Show HN: Dendron – a roam like open source markdown note taking app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dendron – a roam like open source markdown note taking app

dendron.so

127 pointskevinslin39 comments

The folks over at Athens Research [1] (open-source Roam alternative) have made an exhaustive comparison [2] of current notetaking apps with bidirectional link support.

[1] https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

[2] https://www.notion.so/db13644f08144495ad9877f217a161a1?v=ff6...

Looks really similar to https://github.com/foambubble/foam

there's definitely a lot of similarity to foam - these are both markdown-based knowledge bases build on top of vscode and extensions. the major difference with dendron is its focus on hierarchical, lookup based retrieval of notes (https://www.dendron.so/#hierarchies)

wasn't that something roam and or foam tried to avoid, because a lot of notes don't fit into one specific parent?

rigid hierarchies can result in friction to getting thoughts in. but having no hierarchy can be problematic in getting notes back out. dendron tries to walk the line by letting you create links between any two arbitrary notes but also layering on top a flexible hierarchy that lets you prescribe a canonical organization of your notes

And then there was VSCode Memo[1] on Show HN 2 weeks ago (but got no love[2]) - what's the reason that these similar tools are showing up?

[1] https://github.com/svsool/vscode-memo [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23752195

I think it's because they are useful tools that a lot of webdevs see and can see themselves reasonably implementing by themselves. (Like todo lists & habit trackers)

Also, quite a lot of tutorials are to-do lists, habit trackers and note taking apps.

I love how this is shared a few hours after the post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888799) shared by someone who is tired of note taking apps.

In all seriousness though, this looks dope. I'm installing VSCode just to try this out.

the internet has quite the sense of irony :)

also, author of dendron here. if you run into any issues or questions, feel free to message me directly at kevin@thence.io or leave an issue on the github: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron

This is interesting and so is Foam[1]. I've a dumb question. Can I use VSCodium[2] instead of VSCode? (I tried it super-quick with foam on VSCodium and I gave up.)

1. https://github.com/foambubble/foam

2. https://vscodium.com

I manually cloned it into ~/.vscode-oss/extensions and it works just fine.

My biggest issue with many of these solutions is mobile support. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think VS Code runs on iOS.

I have my phone everywhere and am on my phone much more often than I am on a laptop or desktop machine.

My ideal solution would be one that stores my notes in a private git repository. It should allow me to edit and read on mobile or desktop devices.

GitJournal (https://gitjournal.io/) on a phone and Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) on a desktop will get you 90% there. They both do some modifications to the Markdown format (for example, internal linking [[goes like this]]), but they're compatible as of recently.

Obsidian doesn't currently have a built-in Git support, so you'll have to do the push manually from time to time or create a script that will do that every hour or so.

This looks dope! I was never able to fully get into Roam so hopefully this is a bit easier and worth playing around with.

On an unrelated note, seeing this and "Tired of note-taking apps" on the front-page at the same time made me lol.

These tools (this, foam, obsidian, remnote, supernote, etc.) seem interesting but I've been hesitant to try any. This HN comment[0] on a Foam post a few weeks ago resonated with me. I feel like my ideas and personal knowledge base in my mind is really dynamic and that the constant addition of information and rearranging or establishing of new relationships between entities will be too much effort.

I think, at least for my use, a more simply knowledge base (e.g. zotero, are.na, etc.) where I'm able to store, categorize, and search for things is the best option, and I'll leave the establishment of relationships to my mind.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667961

Its a good point. The counter point is the process of reviewing your notes to formalize these connections helps cement those connections into your brain. Basically when you have a thought these two things are connected the system lets you document that thought with minimal friction.

The connections between notes ideally provide an element of surprise. The process is geared towards the long term while minimizing immediate friction.

It points to all this research in support of hierarchical storage, but based off of skimming it it seems like all that research merely only supports directed vs undirected, not tree vs graph. Meaning, a DAG still seems superior to a Tree - does this allow children to have multiple parents?

children can only have 1 canonical parent but can have any number of backlinks to other nodes in the graph

I found myself wanting a graph based approach too, with multiple parents, so I created Very Nested [1] to find out what it was like.

It's open source, outline focused (like workflowy) and uses GitHub for storage and hosting. It also supports files and images.

So far, I've enjoyed organising my recipes [2] with it.

Feedback welcome, it's very new.

[1] https://verynested.cadell.dev/

[2] https://cooking.cadell.dev/

LET ME JUST SAY, a pox on these things that depend on VSCode. I don't use VSCode, I never have, and I don't anticipate doing so any time soon for coding, much less taking notes.

EDIT:

I did not say a pox on such applications; on the contrary. I'm actually trying to find one that does everything I want, and am being brought up short on the VSCode dependency just about every time I come up on a good candidate.

Hmm, being built on top of an extendable code editor is very appealing. The ability to write TS/JS to extend Notion is something I've wanted. I haven't really used VS Code (I'm deep in the Jetbrains ecosystem) but maybe I need to give it another shot even if just for this. I loved Sublime Text before I moved to IDEA.

vscode is pretty close to the jetbrains system. and its ecosystem of extensions is probably the best out of any IDE

This looks cool. I’ve long wanted a note app where I can make a web of notes, draw visual links between either entire documents or chunks of text to sort, organise and create connections.

Best I’ve found so far are post-it notes, a big wall and lots of printouts.

Stuff like this look like amazing interesting digital-first alternative.

I’ve found Supernotes (https://supernotes.app) to be quite useful for this

> CRM to keep track of clients, friends and enemies

I found that bit funny.

Seriously, though, I like that it seems to use front matter for metadata, which makes it a lot more interesting than just relying on filenames (although schemas are cute, I don’t think they’re that useful when you can use metadata).

This looks complementary to my nested hierarchy kanban board kanception.io

Would you be interested in collaborating?

This would be much easier to understand if you set the gif's to repeat (I'm viewing on my iPhone and need to refresh the page to view each gif before it completes)

didn't know that was a thing. just converted it to loop. thanks for the tip!

Is there a tree view component for exploring the hierarchy or is there only text-based search of the hierarchy?

no tree view yet but we do have a graph view: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron-template/blob/master/va...

My reaction to this; a journey.

Hey I've been looking for something like this.

Ahh local first, and markdown. I might like this.

Fuzzy search? I've gotta try this!

Wait, is this electron?

Please don't be electron, please don't be electron, please don't be electron!

> Made ontop of VS Code

Well, shit I'm out. Damnit!

~fin~

I miss real applications...

I'm a very vocal critic of Electron, but giving credit where credit is due, VSCode doesn't really feel like an Electron app at all. It's very snappy and modest with its memory usage, so I'm quite certain the folks at Microsoft had to sign a deal with the Devil to optimize it like that.

VSCode really is a strange counter-example, in a good way. I have 3 IDEs open at the moment, and it is the most lightweight of them, by a factor of three. (And yes, with all its extensions and features, I would say it's more of an IDE than a text editor.) Comparisons to VS itself do not end favourably for the native app.

It's also worth noting that while the overhead of Electron can be considered incredibly wasteful for a note taking app, the ratio becomes much more reasonable for something as resource intensive as an IDE. In this case, I imagine most of the target audience would already be running VSCode for dev work.

I'm really not a fan of "Electron for everything", but I don't understand this reaction. VS Code is quite good compared to a lot of the other apps build on Electron, so I'd not discard it just because of that.

VSCode might be the best of the electron apps, but being best of the worst isn't something to brag about.

A lot of HN readers seem to be vocal critics of electron except in the case of VSCode which no one is allowed to criticize or risk being downvoted.

Lol, you're not kidding, TIL

I use vscode, it must be good, downvotes for thoes who disagree!

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