Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
dendron.so
dendron.so
I really hope a true VSCode competitor will emerge in the future that is truly open source and not controlled by a company that does not have its users best interests in mind; all this Linux-friendly stuff Microsoft is doing lately is to basically get people into their ecosystem and then slowly push out Linux and other alternatives (e.g. who's using sublime / atom anymore?). There is some pithy name for this strategy that escapes me, but effectively it is the equivalent of dumping in commerce: use one's cash reserves to sell a product at a loss in order to squeeze out competitors, then capitalize on the cornered market (i.e. "All Hail Microsoft!" after trying to squeeze out others).
I really wish the Xi [0] editor gained more traction, though as an Emacs user I'm hoping the speedup with v28 and the GccEmacs [1] go a long way there. I would certainly like more parallelism though, e.g. `dired` mode not pausing the entire editor when moving a large file, and I've never really become fluent in elisp.
[0] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs
Don't get me wrong. VS Code is most certainly a loss leader for the Microsoft ecosystem. This businessmodel for gaining developer mindshare is not new. It was pioneered by the free software ecosystem, but has been the defacto standard for some time now.
https://dendron.so/notes/9134f160-31a6-4ab0-a640-1fce466f952...
The reason VS Code is so successful is exactly because it's under control of a company which has it's users best interests in mind. It's just that the users interest are not identical with some users political interest.
A users best interest is that the tool works without pain and solves the task at hand fast. Anything else comes afterwards. And VS Code is seems to be very dedicated to make exactly this possible. They don't compromise with pointless stuff, and focus on satisfying the most customers. And this works very well so far. Better than any open source-project I've seen to be honest.
It's likely an unpopular choice given it's from 'Big-Co, Inc', etc, but it's hard to beat. My favorite feature that sold me is the ability to tab and instantly create an inline table (with each subsequent tab pressing creating additional columns). It's quite powerful and flexible. You can also add multiple text blocks to a note page allow for extra context to be placed anywhere. This isn't limited to just text, but adding a graphic to an existing text block, again anywhere on the note 'space'
Honestly, it's really quite an impressive note app and I've moved completely off of Bear in favor of it. The syncing is also free, which was something I was paying a yearly sub to Bear for. The cherry on-top is the also free iOS app which works really well too.
That said, I do think there is room for something like Dendron, which is pretty slick and I quite like that it's a VS-Code add-on. I'll def give it a serious look, nice job!
Also it took a big step backwards when they discontinued the office version and forced everyone to use the app version which has a lot less options. Perhaps that's your problem.
This is where Dendron shines. Dendron's navigator side panel is clean of clutter and easy to navigate, even when you have hundreds of notes. You can also navigate your notebook by open TODOs, nested tags, saved (regex or non rgex) search filters, or by graph view.
Also, it has quirky, but very annoying behavior, like how it won't save my position on a page after the screen turns off. This makes it challenging to get back to the step I was on in a complicated recipe (what I mostly use OneNote for now).
Let me know if you have any feedback or questions after you start using it.
> Dendron is a highly opinionated note taking tool that focuses on hierarchal note taking. It provides the freedom of Roam’s every note exists everywhere philosophy while layering on top flexible hierarchies to keep track of it all. [0]
Not sure how I feel about that approach. However, it does look pretty polished and I'll likely check it out at some point.
[0] - https://www.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e8...
Obsidian is cool in my eyes because I can start it up and click around if I want (more of review tool and looking at a cool graph), but in general I just create/edit my files in Vim. That's why I'm unsure about the opinionated hierarchy deal of Dendron. It just seems like another layer to deal with - although not much of a stretch to see a value add with it. Right now, I don't have enough files to be overwhelmed with my ad-hoc structure to spend the time trying it.
(No affiliation, just a happy insider)
I've found from using Evernote for a decade that I've really focussed on making evergreen notes -- notes that I continue adding to over time. I worry that the Roam-like notebooks instead lead you to making a "Personal Wikipedia" of your knowledge, where many notes are just the stub of an article, because it's so easy to do.
I worry that, if I used this, instead of a 2-3 big pages on Topic X, I'd have 50 little notes on Topic X, which, yes, I can find through backlinks, but I would not have felt like I had synthesized.
Thoughts?
the way we are approaching it, which i have adopted for my personal use, is to have a data dictionary file that defines the terms used. that is used as a structural launching point for fleshing out each page precisely once and keeping terminology consistent. then, Obsidian handles the linking between each page when each term appears.
this works really well for documents that don’t absolutely have to be read in a very linear order and users can effectively bounce around to whatever they are interested in. for a published manual, like “how to use postgres” or something, this strategy would not work at all.
This is not a "Roam-like tool" by that description. Notes are basically markdown. A bullet might contain a link to a different note, or you could link to several in a bullet or paragraph, or you could link to none, but using bullets doesn't implicitly create nested notes any more than it normally creates separate nested documents in Markdown.
The additional logic seems more built around the directory structure than bullets.
> I worry that, if I used this, instead of a 2-3 big pages on Topic X, I'd have 50 little notes on Topic X, which, yes, I can find through backlinks, but I would not have felt like I had synthesized.
I haven't used Dendron, just barely installed it and poked around, but it seems like the combination of markdown documents and a heirarchical organization alongside a link graph makes it more straightforward to maintain large bodies of maintained/synthesized content rather than small bits of linked content that are easy to navigate but hard to pull together (which tools that focus on linking between small documents as the main structure do seem to encourage.)
It does take some more work though. So the easy ness is an issue.
Org mode works that way, as well as supporting the one-note-per-file paradigm. It's a very flexible tool.
Some day there should emerge some kind of de-facto winner in this category, because it's so sad that it's 2020 and there's still not a super wide-spread mass-adoption kind of general purpose app for handling hierarchical data and interacting with it.
When XML was invented I was sure it would change the world (and arguably, enabling RSS/Atom did), but now in 2020 you don't hear much about XML.
All word processors should be hierarchical rather than monolithic (linear), imo, and Quanta endeavors to show one way to do that in a wiki-like app.
[0] https://quanta.wiki/app?id=5ca14747487e8f0001a3bcff#5ca25b1a...
In short: he's routinely wrong, his views never progress in recognition of his many MANY errors, because he feels that his views are correct regardless of what the facts are; all while smugly bleating "Facts Don't Care About Feelings".
he's so comically unserious, he had to change the title of his own book after liberals pointed out to him that he miscounted how many arguments he was making in "10 rules for debating leftists": https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/12574410677308620...
most of the others on that list are just as bad but it's noteworthy that this laughable "intellectual dark web" has Ben Shapiro among those playing the victim card as if he is a repressed academic even though he openly and cynically proclaims his unwillingness to engage honestly with the opposition ("So, the only other reason that you should ever have a conversation, or be friends with anyone on the left and, and not even be friends, is if you're in public in front of a large audience and then your goal is to humiliate them as badly as possible")
these people aren't "intellectuals" or even remotely serious.
XML is a data-format, not an enduser-format. It's used everywhere, what is there more to hear about it?
> All word processors should be hierarchical rather than monolithic (linear)
No, they should not, it's just a pain. Word processors have hierarchical view, but enforcing it would be a harmful. In the first place, word processors are not note-systems. It's not their job to manage your files.
The way Quanta works is that every sentence or paragraph can have an entire conversation thread underneath it, which is light-years ahead of the "Revision Marks" feature of MS Office/365 for example. The model Quanta is using for team collaboration on documents means for example you can post a big long question about a single sentence in a doc, and it doesn't get in the way of the main doc, or become visible unless expanded.
They way Quanta works is definitely the future, even if it's some other platform other than Quanta where this takes off.
I'm currently using tiddlywiki[2] so that's primarily what I'm comparing it too.
Both tiddlywiki and dendron look very similar, supporting various forms of linking to one another. Dendron seems to have a more complete hierarchical way of combining pages, at least compared to the way that I use tiddlywiki.
Tiddlywiki's advantage is the amount of plugins it has available. I think I also still prefer tiddlywiki because I just have it hosted on a server, so I can access my notes from whatever machine, including my phone. For dendron ( an electron app ) I'm guessing I would have to have some sort of Dropbox/Nextcloud system setup to sync notes between machines. The fact that I'm in my browser all the time and can just open a web page to access tiddlywiki is also preferable. The least amount of friction between a thought in my head to being able to write it down, the better.
I was interested in Dendron because looking at its website, dendron supports a graph visualization of all your notes, like concept mapping[3]. But unfortunately it doesn't look like this concept mapping feature is prioritized, or the main focus of dendron. That's really the main thing I would like to add to tiddlywiki, some sort of functional concept mapping feature. I've tried tiddlymap[4], but its not very well supported.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3io2fHRmZsE
I thought the point was to store the data, and distribute it in git or something.
And let's not think about if you accidentally forgot to sync your two repos, and now you have to deal with merge conflicts.
That being said, Dendron lets you publish your notes as static sites (eg. https://dendron.so is just published using notes) and we'll be expanding this feature to do private hosting of notes with limited editing capabilities later in December
For me org-roam doesn't scratch the portability itch (easily add notes on my phone etc), but I'm actively looking for alternatives I can make the jump for, and rely on it not disappearing in a few years
I really like the idea of this extension, but as mentioned I'm not sure this existing only in VSCode helps me much at this point.
Props for releasing though, great to see this revolution in note taking apps, and shifts in thought around the optimal way to take them.
For notes I'm (currently) using Obsidian.md, which has many of the same benefits of the previously mentioned systems. I settled on it because it allowed me to easily import notes from the previous apps and they are stored as simple markdown files. Which means I can access them using vi if I'm on a system that doesn't have Obsidian installed.
While I enjoy VSCode, most of my development is done in Visual Studio. And occasionally vi/vim for smaller applications.
It's less an "app" and more a set of recommended extensions that work well together. At the end of the day you have markdown files in a directory, however you want to manage and sync them (git, dropbox, rsync, whatever).
https://foambubble.github.io/foam
My personal setup also integrates heavily with my Zotero toolkit for tracking and storing papers and other materials.
As with all things, its a matter of tradeoffs. Dendron started its life as a standalone app (eg. think Obsidian) but I quickly realized I was spending most of my time building undifferentiated editor scaffolding instead of focusing on the hierarchies and schemas that made Dendron unique.
I wanted to spend more time building out features that supported Dendron's [hiearchy first approach](https://www.kevinslin.com/notes/3dd58f62-fee5-4f93-b9f1-b0f0...) to note taking which is what led me to re-write it for VSCode.
That being said, the core dendron engine is not vscode specific and there are folks that are experimenting with porting it over to other editors (eg. sublime, vim). We also have plans for a standalone editor in the future (most likely, this will be a fork of VSCode optimized for note taking)
Assertions can have supporting statements (as children), that can be further expanded and evaluated.
This way, I can evaluate and discard branches, distilling an argument to what matters.
Would a tool like this help me?
There are some things I would change, but I’m happy about the time and effort I’ve put in to the discussions there.
We built a note-taking system around digital notecards instead of documents, and those cards can be both linked hierarchally with parent/child relationships (and unlike most other platforms a card can have multiple parents) as well as with inline markdown link-style linking that you'll find in many other apps / wikis / tools for thought.
I definitely think the notecard format could be very useful for this use-case, as one card = one argument makes a lot of sense.
[https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan/blob/master/README_en_...]
The app itself is in English. It's got a WYSWYG editor with a nice table feature.
Here is a side-by-side to get the idea (the theme may be subject to taste, but it's not really relevant to the topic anyway, and there are a lot, less fancy ones as well):
https://forum.obsidian.md/uploads/default/original/1X/3c3aaf...
Edit: word repetition
Did it used to be a VS Code extension?
Advantage that Dendron has is that it is based on VSCode which is fantastic foundation. Pretty much why I love Obsidian, you type fast and can work on ideas quickly.
I personally couldn't care less about graph, it looks pretty but to me not useful at all.
Good thing about tools like this is that you can sync and backup text files.
Bad thing is that having mobile app would be difficult. However, I use IAWriter to write into type of Inbox on my phone and this file is in Obsidian (again same workflow like Dendron)
To me personally, Dendron is too similar to existing one I am using, otherwise solid tool and would recommend to people.
The biggest thing for me is the lightweight structure- I would have never created a hierarchical structure if I had to create multiple nested folders every time I wanted a new category.
Hoping for some mobile support in the future.
We should catch up sometime, it's been too long :D It's not the same as mobile support but currently any markdown enabled mobile app can support writing to Dendron. Here are a few apps that my other users have suggested: https://dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def4b486...
We also have an active discord channel with lots of good people: https://discord.gg/AE3NRw9
I guess everyone values something different. I am happy to pay for these tools, and even have them closed-source, as long as
(1) it can run locally, "offline", and (2) the format is open (index-able text, whether one file or many)
Foam seems to be Obsidian ported to VSCode, minus several features and without a searchable graph view.
dendron is also, in part, inspired by roam (backlinks, daily journals, etc) but is built around the notion of [hierarchical note taking](https://www.kevinslin.com/notes/3dd58f62-fee5-4f93-b9f1-b0f0...). dendron takes the structure provided by well built hierarchies and combines it with the freedom of roam's backlinks and block references.
while dendron also relies on third party extensions, the majority of functionality is inside the dendron extension. you can refactor notes via regex (dendron will update both backlinks and file names), lookup your notes via their path, apply schemas to categorize your notes, and much more.
Am I the only one that still uses pen and paper? To me, there's a certain je ne sais quoi about closing my laptop and putting my phone away, grabbing a pen and my notebook, and brainstorming without technology.
Simplest one was notepad and always worked for me.
And afterwards I scan the page for archival.
I'd love some kind of e-paper solution, in a notebook form, but I've no idea how it could gracefully and capably mimic the act of turning pages and having a chrono-spacial awareness of where the content in each of those pages lie.
In some far future we'll have paper-thin writeable electronic displays and can literally make a notebook to rule them all, but it'll be a while. And even then, likely very expensive.
Context: every time Remarkable hits Hacker News I'm intrigued, but I couldn't pull the trigger on a pre-order. I love the idea they're selling.
The customers at the top of the preorder queue for v2 got their tablets about a month ago[1] so the number of people able to write such a review will be limited for the next month or so.
Worth noting there is open source tooling for modding/ssh access to remarkable tablets[2].
[1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000264587...
I have thought about this in the past, keeping it all documented on notebooks, but indexing is one part that has made me question how to organize them.
Thank you!
Our brain works wonders, yet mysteriously. I can somehow locate notes I wrote by hand on notebooks years ago. I remember the sketches, the color and size of the notebook, the location on the shelves ... and sometimes, finding the note isn’t important because I have actually memorized it.
It could a visual memory thing, reinforced by 20+ years of pen and paper school system. Were I 20 years younger and having been taught on tablets/xxx, I could have developed a different long term memory system. As of today, writing down notes on my computer feels like offloading my brain to disk. When writing notes of paper/iPad, it feels like writing to my brain.
I don’t know how our memory works and I guess our passion / interest plays an important part, as your conscious thoughts revisits those subjects as a routine.
I am just noticing how the multidimensional characteristics of hand written notes seem to provide “more ways” to search and explore our memory. Just like having both a spatial and a full text indices.
I have never used note taking apps though. I normally just draft some text, prepare some slides, or write some pseudo code if it is a coding problem.
But I've been keeping a daily work-journal for the past few years, and that has been very handy. I have one org-mode file for each company I've worked in, and each day I insert a new block with headings that make sense "Meetings", "Stories/Tickets/Projects", "Problems", etc.
I make notes of commands, recipes, and tag things literally so get an integrated tag-cloud and this is exceptionally useful when I want to lookup how I did something a few months ago, or more!
I guess I call it a tag-cloud, even if it isn't formatted like one would imagine on a web-page.
No package, just a bit of lisp-magic. I'd be happy to share an example if it were useful.
https://github.com/skx/org-worklog
That shows the tag-cloud and the necessary magic to update it on-save.
I've got a bit of code in my init-files that does that automatically, that's linked to in the readme. But as a quick alternative you can scroll down to the end, to the line that starts:
"(defun new-day"
Otherwise copy and paste the lisp from here into your emacs init file, and reload everything:
https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md...
That will cause anything named `skx-startblock` to be evaluated automatically from an org-file on-load, and will also run the contents of `skx-saveblock` before saving any org-file, if present.
Pros: There seems to be something inherently meaningful (read: brain lights up, it’s got sensory depth and intellectual weight) about doing tactile pen/paper notes since many people report better engagement and higher retention when doing pen/paper (myself included)
Nothing beats the fluidity, ubiquity and the sheer aesthetic quality of pen on paper. Excellent for diagrams and notes as I am discussing something on a call, or explaining things (mostly yo myself) consuming information dense video or audio content.
But I don't always have my notebook on me, and I tend to loose bits of paper easily. So to capture thoughts, I use "email thyself" on my phone.
Every once a few weeks, I clear out my inbox. Most notes go to junk. Some get cross referenced. Fewer still become actual files in my git repo.
My git repo is just a versioned bunch of files with upto 2 levels of hierarchy.
This works amazingly well, for capturing information. no lock-ins, no fear of losing content, frequently gets cleaned up and cross referenced with version history (which I dont mind losing as I have dates in the text files themselves).
What I haven't figured out (yet) is a sustainable way to regularly go back to the content I've collected to keep them rolling through my memory without it being an overwhelming amount of work.
Refreshing things regularly is the best, most effective way to find patterns and make better connections. Haven't broken that code yet.
But what are pen and paper but really old technology? :-) And given they were able to revolutionize human thought, it seems possible that other such wins are out there, waiting for us to find them.
(I do agree with the sentiment that pen/pencil are currently the best we've got along multiple axes, probably with the exception of search.)
You’re not wrong, it’s just that note management apps are vegetable chopping machines, and we’re desperately in search of a Robot Coupe.
I think there are 2 different use cases:
- note taking as building a knowledge base (ex: 'how to add a route permanently in CentOS') where pen & paper is clearly inferior (not searchable, not available everywhere once it becomes bigger than a notebook)
- brainstorming and here I would argue that the first step is just thinking before writing anything.
- I made one around 2007. Perfect for a niche, but there are infinitely many niches.
Moleskine Cahier quad-ruled paper journals (with a modified/hybrid bullet-journal approach) ... plus RoamResearch.
Some day I may get around to writing about my system.
They only solve the problems the same way when viewed from distance. If you look closer, there often is a significant difference in some details which make them fundamental different tools.
> Am I the only one that still uses pen and paper?
I try it from time to time, and then fail over the shortcomings of paper. Additionally, with paper it's hard to manage digital content. Having a unified system for everything, that on top can even be automated is the real endgame of personal data managment.
> and brainstorming without technology.
Brainstorming is something differnt. It generates temporary data which you can throw away after wards. For this of course is paper better or a whiteboard. But you are supposed to clean up the results of the brainstorm-session and make something more lasting out of it, and for this digital media is better on long terms.
- Plain-as-in-Plain Text - meaning I don't have to export my notes as JSON or XML or something else. Each note is a single .md or .txt file.
- Full-text search
- No Markup Lock-in - Meaning, for example, that I can use any flavor of Markdown (in my case MultiMarkdown) that I'd like and export/preview/build the file elsewhere.
- Preferably Mac native...or anything not Electron if necessary
- Wikilinks, please
The Archive fills these needs but after looking at their Roadmap, I've realized that I have no intentions of paying for an upgrade when V2 is released and I do not want to risk V1 slowly becoming a mess to operate somewhere down the line if I can find an alternative. The Archive is great because it's simple and it's core but can be extendable if necessary.
Obsidian is nice...but has too much going on for my liking. Same with Org-Roam.
I'm really considering Emacs w/ Zetteldeft.
The export of notes dumps as guid.md file name.
I personally like it because it has the features I want, works well on mobile, local first backed up by sync (you provide the target) and the API isn't hard to use.
At least for me right now full text search, no lock in, good phone support and sync that works is all I need to build a good note taking habit.
IMO the value that you get from going from not taking notes to taking notes is much bigger than the value jump you get if you go from taking unstructured notes to structured notes .
Two problems with these types of things is 1. the graph is most useful on large displays. I have not tried the mobile apps. On a large data set I would imagine scrolling and zooming would be needed. 2. Search is still a key feature. Even with fully linked graph structure, finding something would take too long, 'tip of the tongue' recall problem.
I've methodically used many of the available notetaking apps in the past year- Dynalist, Roam, Remnote, Obsidian, and Siyuan, on top of several years of using Onenote, Evernote, Trilium, and Joplin. The three criteria that I've found to best sum up the notetaking experience are 1) Friction in capturing a new thought 2) Friction in finding a previous thought and 3) How memorable the note structure is. I've found Dendron to have subtle but well throught-out features that gives it a strong balance in these uses, standing out from the rest.
Dendron solves the problem of visually organizing notes
Ive always had an issue with too many notes with all different titles, creating giant dropdown menus in the sidebars of note apps. My Google Docs documents list needs its own table of contents. It's not an issue anymore because Dendron's organization brings in an X-axis to the formerly single direction binary tree organization, and I've been using that to keep my nav sidebar clean.
Dendron's "schema" syntax looks just like the .JSON or .OPML outputted by a mind mapping app. Dendron creates a graph/mindmap not of the individual notes, but of the organization of the notes. So it represents the ontologies and "phylogenies" of knowledge as a map, just like how my mind does. There's something more memorable about navigating to your notes from a map, than from a table of contents or by ctrl-F.
Dendron allows you to create new notes that "branches" off the namespace of an existing note. I use this to seperate source material and my own annotations on subjects. It supports my dream of having my own frictionless intranet to take notes on. I use the Markdown Clipper browser extension copy entire webpages into Dendron. When I look up something up on UptoDate.com, a pretty dense medical database, I just copy the whole article into Dendron. Next time I look up the same topic, I head for my Dendron note, and use link to make my own mental wikipedia out of what I understood out of the information. Then when I want to review a topic, give a presentation, or make a review outline, can reference in my own notes plus the original context where I read the information in the first place.
Also, Dendron integrates well with the VSCode to Anki extension.
But i think this works best with big monitor (think 43'') and when the graph is the main interface, not just a small window somewhere. I.e. display the content of nodes directly in an infinite-pan&zoom graph view.
Code reading could be nice this way. I suppose mentally one builds up a similar graph everytime reading through code. And eventually get lost. One can hold only so many things in flesh(sic) memory...
I imagine that with common workflows (one of which I just proposed) without the barrier of context switching could be a big win. At a certain zoom level I'm envisioning being able to directly see which portions of source are touched by the different PRs for example.
Another example of this is in applying this toward file browsing and the management of backups (i'll want to sprinkle tree differencing visualization in there).
Some thoughts: Source code should be able to fall back to editable text when necessary.
Multiple Projections to view/interface the same data with different views must be possible.
Optimal would be that it integrates any editor I'd like (I want sublime, others not so much). Ideally other file formats like word documents, latex documents etc. should also be supported. But that sounds very hard, basically makes the whole thing an infinte pan zoom graph based window manager (with all the other graph related features). Hm.. Maybe this all really is on the operating system level.
I favor html as base technology for the reason of easily including different "apps", like code editors, pdf viewers, webgl content, etc.
But thats just because I don't really want to develop this at the window manager/operating system level... Honestly I feel html is too slow for what I really want. There is a reason I use sublime and not VSCode, even it is just a millisecond or so.
I hope more people think in similar directions with the graph based interface. May one day some hero actually succeed with what we envision. I encourage you to be that one!
I'm working on a knowledge store and so many of the node/graph navigation tools are heavy JS libraries. I'd like to implement a pure HTML one for ultimate lightweight, but i've never seen one - so i'm struggling on inspiration.
So I was happy to read this on Dendron website (author linked it elsewhere):
> That being said, the core dendron engine is not vscode specific and there are folks that are experimenting with porting it over to other editors (eg. sublime, vim). We also have plans for a standalone editor in the future (most likely, this will be a fork of VSCode optimized for note taking)
I also started a paper notepad with Zettelkasten method - I have some notes there, but I haven't established an effective habit for it. I'll see how that develops - but I still want to publish my thoughts.
I wish I stayed with my PersonalWiki - I feel a need to constantly add and modify the articles even after publishing them. But the ideal would be something that works like: https://www.gwern.net/About - now I understand the need for a LongSite (https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site).
There are many contenders presented in this discussion here, with lists of features, what is lacking from these analyses is the business models that would give me a feeling of security for my potential LongSite.