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Comment by nullandvoid | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting for me. I've just got into roam the last few months after an intertest in trying zettelkasten (and my notion growing rather unwieldly), but the $15/m is grinding at me. The idea I'll be locked in at that price forever more doesn't sit well

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.

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Foam is a Roam-like that is open source, easily modifiable and assembled on top of VSCode but leaves you with plain jane markdown. I use a vanilla markdown editor on my phone for quick notes, and then fire up VScode when I need tools.

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.

Thanks for the props.

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)

Can you point us in direction of sublime and vim ports? I searched around and came up empty.

I went through a similar tool search (i.e. zettelkasten, roam, notable.md, dendron, etc). With the same notions of dendron operating only in VSCode. Long story, it didn't fit well for me. While dendron operated and was structured well, VSCode was just too slow to launch and not widely available enough for my use case. May be important to note though that I don't 'live' in VSCode like many others do. I settled on other applications which allow me to directly interact with the files inside and outside the application.

what do you use as a texteditor/IDE?

Are you asking specifically for notes or as the development environment that I _do_ live in?

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.

You might want to check out Dynalist. I've used it for project planning and idea dumps for a couple years and it's served perfectly for me. Saved my bacon with school notes as well. As for lock-in, their paid plan includes daily experts so even if the service vanished, all my notes are safe as markdown files.

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