Athens an open source Roam alternative
github.com
github.com
There's this latent idea of "man if only I could get a proper note taking system in place I'd be doing killer work", put another way, "we aren't successful because we're taking notes the wrong way! (not because our ideas are not good or because we simply are not one of the lucky few that will make it)" which unfortunately, is usually false. We like to focus on little micro improvements to our processes because they tangentially relate to work and feel productive, but at the end of the day, are still just another form of procrastination.
All that said, I use org mode and you should too :P
There is obviously an itch that needs scratching in personal knowledge base software. That has certainly been my experience. I can see from the outside it might just look like 100% hype.
Personally, my life has been vastly improved with note taking software over the last four years. I can't imagine going back now. Some people I'm sure are ok with just a big text file.
The software is almost not important. A new knowledge-base language is emerging, with Markdown-like formatting, but less emphasis on html style page breaking, [[wiki style]] links, and various syntaxes for backlinks and metadata.
I've gone from vim-wiki, to various other systems, and migrating I was able to just do with some simple perl scripts.
But my knowledge wikis have been effortlessly growing. I have a git repo now with many submodules for my different wikis.
I really think that we are looking at this the wrong way. This is not nearly that much of a technical problem. This is just at the awkward stage where we are figuring out the best patterns for personal knowledge. It's not a problem that we will solve, but at least some good general strategies will probably emerge.
Personally, I mostly just use a roam-like wiki, but I also have two Zettelkasten submodules as well. My two zetts deal with such different domains that it would be more helpful that they be in completely different namespaces.
But yeah, most of the software is crap. The best tools I have found have been small user scripts for editors. I used an Atom based suite that handled my digital gardens. I've been moving to FOAM.
I think the best thing you can do is try to learn from what has worked for other people, and not get too hung up on any one technology.
Where I think people are going off the rails is thinking that this can work as a business. I'm hugely skeptical that there's a market here; businesses rely on some measure of "if you don't pay you can't have this part of the thing." -- and even if a startup is able to make this work, it's likely that the "value-add" will be easily replicable into something free (as in freedom) owing to the nature of this being a "power-user" thing.
For example, none of these things promise too much more than, e.g. Zim-wiki (longtime user here) -- which itself is extensible either as FOSS, or simply owing to the fact that it saves in Markdown-ish, immediately MAKING it extensible anyway.
It's quite similar to the proliferation of code editors from 2005-2015ish. For a while, practically every language had its own IDE (for me, I remember using HaXe and FlashDevelop). Then, editors like Atom and Sublime came along, raising the bar. For the past five years or so, seems to be the default. The excellent extension system allows people to worry about features, rather than re-creating the IDE.
When it comes to note-taking, I expect the same thing to happen--we just need a good, open-source foundation. I fully expect that the winner will be a wrapper around ProseMirror [1]. See also ReMirror [2]
But unlike IDEs and programming language support, note-taking is inherently personal. There is no one-size fits all. I am more disorganized than otherwise, but I prefer separate tools for separate occasions. I like pen and paper for quick jot-downs and napkin math, notepad++/Sublime for quick copy-pastes, OneNote for $DAYJOB and org-mode for long term knowledge base and blogging.
I am sure real people exist who prefer one over the other on more than one occasion.
Being pessimistic, but I would bet it will be a walled garden. The solution will probably be key-in-hands and the easiest way for this is a traditional webapp. Not many people care about data ownership and bother dealing with their own file server.
See Notion, Google Keep, WorkFlowy, Dynalist, etc.
It's pretty clear from e.g. Roam's pricing that they're primarily targeting institutional licenses. They seem to have been pretty successful there, too.
Once Athens arrives, I fully expect them to eat Roam's lunch when it comes to individuals.
The killer app is "context aware indexing", not notes...
We've gotten pretty good at recording everything, but recalling it at the appropriate time and context is still the big challenge.
When Roam started becoming popular, I began hearing about Zettelkasten. It's yet another note taking system, except that it focuses on the context of when you might need the information, rather than just what's the best way to sort/archive it. A new way of thinking, to me.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth...
You mean a piece of paper with a filing cabinet? I’ve been trying note taking apps for 15 years and nothing beats a plain old notebook for ease of use, flexibility, and helping me think.
I don’t do filing cabinets so retrieval has suffered. And for me personally that hasn’t been a problem because most of my notes are ephemeral. When I’m ready to save something long term I write a blogpost and let Google take care of the rest.
PS: the main issue with most note taking apps is that there’s just something fundamentally different about thinking on the keyboard vs. thinking with a pen in hand. Digital pens have so far not been able to replicate the feeling for some reason.
For me, I like to save URLs and write a short note about everything I read. Typing is much quicker than hand-writing, and I can easily embed images / math / etc..
There indeed had always been many but I've never seen anything nearly as cool before Roam and Notion arrived.
And we certainly need a free self-hosted alternative to be able to use this at work without uploading company-confidential data to a 3rd-party black-box cloud.
Also like that it's just CSS for the theming - I'm kind of particular about my typography so I like that I can set it up the way I want it.
I sync to a private repo and use an (albeit hacky) combination of GitJournal (for creating new .md files in a /mobile folder) and SpeckEditor (for editing files in the repo) on mobile.
For me, WYSIWYG is essential, since my notes contain a lot of math, and I don't want to stare at LaTeX source all day. For that reason, stopped using Overleaf in favor of Typora [1] for a while, but grew out of it as my note-base became large enough to need a good wikilink system.
Quarantine gave me enough free time to build my own note-taking app [3]. So, these days, when I get frustrated with my note-taking app, I have only myself to blame :)
[1] https://prosemirror.net/ [2] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math [3] https://noteworthy.ink/
During quarantine I've been working on an open-source alternative called Noteworthy (https://noteworthy.ink/). It's not quite ready for release yet, but keep an eye out the next few months! The source is here, you can technically build it if you try hard enough: (https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy)
The goal is to be as modular and extensible as possible. People shouldn't have to keep re-inventing file trees, Markdown parsing, etc.. This is my first large TypeScript/Electron project so code feedback is always welcome, especially in the early stages.
In the meantime, you might be interested in Zettlr, an open-source editor with similar features which is a bit more stable.
If you don't mind me asking, what features in particular are you looking for in an editor?
The file tree idea, where a file exists in only one place in the hierarchy is wrong. I'd rather all my notes/files were in one big bucket, but that I could label each, and then sort by labels.
I may want to label a file as 'software', 'tech-architecture' and 'finance' - all of them. When I look up any one of those labels, I want to get all the related content. I shouldn't need to guess which bucket I put a note into. So, I say labels should be data associated to files like modified date, or author.
To fix the problem of 'no label' as part of the data, I try to use a note taking that applies labels for me. But then an app developer is going to want to do all sorts of extra stuff.
I understand that having tons of label data on the file could become ridiculous though. Perhaps the real answer would be to have a hidden metadata file associated with the data itself (eg 'mytext.txt.meta') - labels and any other metadata would go in here, separate to the note 'mytext.txt' itself.
So, I think OS's enforce a data organisational structure on us that is unnatural to the way we think and work. And we seek to fix it with apps. And we will never get satisfaction that way :(
I've created my own open source approach called Very Nested [1] that uses GitHub repos for storage. It also supports files and images.
So far, I've enjoyed organising my recipes [2] with it.
Feedback welcome, it's new.
Joplin has been fantastic so far -- it offers so much value (cross-platform, reasonable design, markdown support, search) for completely free, and with easy sync options and no feature gates. It needs to get mentioned more.
It seems like productivity apps are the wave now, but Joplin is exactly what I wanted -- a simple cross platform note-taking app.
I'm considering hosting a Joplin WebDAV/S3 sync + backup service for something like $1/month billed yearly -- I wonder if people would be interested. Obviously most people probably just use Nextcloud/Dropbox/OneDrive and there's no real reason to trust some random sync/backup service over the other options, but with encryption turned on, the place you sync to doesn't matter and it feels like people might be interested.
It works on my phone
It works on my computer
It syncs to a cloud provider I specify
It looks like the API it exposes is fairly straight forward for building on top of.
There's a lot to like. True, like a lot of small open source projects, there are some rough edges, and progress is slow, but I believe they welcome new volunteers.
There are, however, a TON of note taking apps floating around at the moment. One is Roam. Roam is very expensive ($15/month; a premium price point in a space that's mostly free or a couple of dollars at most), and has a bit of a...well, almost cult-like atmosphere around it. People that like Roam seem to love it, for some reason. On the other hand, development is fast, and they support TONS of features. Backlinks seems to be a big one. Notably I think Roam is more focused around "blocks" of content than around freeform markdown.
Other options include Notion, Bear, Obsidian, Tiddlywiki, Evernote, Quiver, Dynalist, Workflowy, Standard Notes and many, many, many others. All are excellent options in this space. And now, Athens, which I suppose is trying to be a better, open source Roam?
Honestly, if you care a lot about note taking apps you should dig into it, there's a ton of options and interesting tradeoffs. And if you don't, then....eh, probably doesn't matter much.
I love what they're doing, I understand why they picked the tech stack and architecture they did, and they have some really awesome features! ....but it's just too slow for me. (Then again, I'm picky.)
My the most favorite app is https://www.zettlr.com. It has a simple concept that I really like: this is just markdown files viewer that has ability to: (1) edit (2) search(also by tags) and (3) link files. And that's all.
Files are stored on a local disc in any folder structure someone wants, can be sync using whatever someone wants - Google Drive, Dropbox, Synology NAS, etc.
There is zero vendor lock-in, as it works on plain MD files without any custom elements.
This is one more Electron app, however in that case it is not especially annoying, there are some lags, but acceptable.
Except that it doesn't seem to have a way to integrate notes on different devices... Or do you have a way around that?
We see a clone every other day. I'm glad in part since Roam is too expensive.
> Open-Source Networked Thought. Rolling out our Beta to Sponsors. Read more at https://www.notion.so/athensresearch/MVP-Update-Funding-and-...
[1] https://fsnot.es/ [2] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
https://github.com/athensresearch/athens/blob/master/VISION....
Seems like something between org mode and a graph/adjacency database.
https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/#/page/0
The caveat that "Athens doesn't persist any data yet" is, uh, significant though.