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Comment by vivekweb2013 | Hacker News Reader

vivekweb2013

Hi Friends, I'm the author of GitNoter. I'd love to answer any questions you have

I understand that this allows you to manage collections of notes in Markdown format backed up to a Git repository. This is nice and I consider this to be useful, but I would suggest not to position it against Evernote but against knowledge management tools for teams (internal wikis, confluences of the world, etc)

yeah I agree. This is really the knowledge management tool

When I presented Obsidian to a friend, and he told me that it was just a note-taking app, I was quite shocked by [what I consider to be] such a lack of consideration. Because I really use Obsidian as my second memory [marketing definitely worked on me, it seems :)].

Anyway... I have never used EverNote (==note taking?). And, as you have read, I am reaaaaally in Obsidian (==knowledge management?).

Can any of you elaborate of the conceptual difference between both?

Evernote positioned itself as a "second brain", but turned out to become an awesome Digital Vault. You can throw anything at it and Evernote will happily ingest it. You have blazingly fast search backed by Evernote cloud services, and even have some note linking capabilities but they are rudimentary when compared to a fully fledged PKM like Obsidian, DEVONthink, or others. These newer PKM tools allow you to reflect and reason on the content you have and massage it in ways that surface new ideas and allow you to follow unexpected relationships (hence being a true second brain). This is much more harder to achieve with Evernote.

Both are valid and powerful tools but the use cases are different, maybe just because the definition of "second brain" has moved since Evernote was conceptualized on the 2000s.

If you like Obsidian, check out Logseq. Both handle plain-text Markdown, so you can use them interchangeably. Logseq also handles Org-mode files, if that’s your thing. Everything is local, but works well with cloud storage. There’s also an iOS app. It’s worth a look. (No affiliation)

https://logseq.com/

Agree: Knowledge management, not EverNote at all.

EverNote is all about dropping random files into it (images, pdfs, etc). It's where you store your bills, your receipts, your photos of wine labels. It also has a very handy web clipper extension to save web pages (whole pages, sections, or bookmarks).

I'm sure plenty of people use it differently, but I'm also quite confident (from how I've seen others describe it) that one its primary use-cases is as a big shoebox to dump everything into. You then search for that stuff through titles, tags and OCR in photos.

I use it in a fundamentally different way from Obsidian.

Just a few suggestions (some overlap with other comments). If you really want it to be an Evernote competitor, it should have:

Image/file upload

Web clipper (singlefile is great)

OCR (Tesseract has done what I need, not sure how that compares to Evernote)

Basic task management

Customizable dashboard

Tagging and excellent search (these are Evernote's bread and butter)

WYSIWYG editing

Templates

Integrations

And it would be really nice if it could do math, which would be an advantage over Evernote.

It's possible some of this is already implemented; I only gave your page a short look.

Noted. thanks

TiddlyWiki has hit most of these capabilities for many years now, and is nearly unique in wrapping up all the code and data in a single unit that can be run in any regular browser, from either local storage or a remote server or storage. (It does need a killer web clipper, though...)

TiddlyWiki really is one of the cleverest apps I've ever run across, but I'm not much of a JS programmer, so it's got a bit of a learning curve if you want to hack on it. It's pretty easy to use right out of the box if you don't want to hack on it, though, and I'm giving some thought to moving most of the data I've collected in OneNote to TiddlyWiki to escape Microsoft's clutches after I've finally disentangled myself from Google... One thing I love is that TiddlyWikis I built 20 years ago (granted, they were simpler then) are still perfectly usable today.

My perfect data keeper might be something of a mashup between TiddlyWiki and a JuPyteR notebook.

Another nice thing about TiddlyWiki is that you don't actually have to be a JS programmer to extend it.

I run a local CGI server and that allows me to make all kinds of customizations in the language I want (most languages support local CGI servers). The querying capabilities of TiddlyWiki make it a nice database.

It looks clean and super good! Considering moving from Obsidian as it gets more refined.

A few more features IMO would be nice: (fuzzy) search; task management; math formula support; or just expose API for such development would be great as well.

thanks. I've noted the feedback. I'll work on implementing these features.

You don't have to compare this to Evernote. I really like what you have done so far. The preview of the MD is fantastic. Feels hard enough for me to find just that! I love the use of GitHub. I'm in!

Thanks so much for the kind words

Congrats. I think there's an opportunity for a markdown-based Confluence competitor. Something that can be used by non technical people. You might want to consider that use-case/positioning rather than personal note-taking.

Major missing feature for the average user I think would be easy image/binary upload, embedding and preview.

By leveraging Github (and Gitlab please) auth it makes this usable by enterprise which is smart I think.

thanks so much for the feedback. I'm working on providing the image upload functionality. Markdown preview is currently available with the preview button in the right corner of markdown editor.

Congratulations on the launch!

Others have mentioned about Search, In case you choose to implement it then I'd suggest a special attention towards code search. I presume formatting code with markdown is a non-issue, So implementing first class code search capabilities would be real differentiator among other notes applications and could likely fill a need-gap.

Looks really cool, congrats on the launch! How would multiplayer notes work? Assuming everyone has access to the repo.

Thanks. Any number of users can use GitNoter simultaneously on any number of devices against a single repo as long as all of them has write access to the repository.

Why should I use your tool and not Joplin?

Because it does not require desktop client. It stores the notes in git repository so you have access to all the revisions which is very useful in case you want to revert any changes

Does this support shared note-taking - I tried fast forwarding through the video tour (please consider making it shorter) and it mentioned changing repositories so in that same line of thought - is multi-repository note taking possible, each shared with different people?

Hi, does this support maths notation via MathJax or Katex?

Not currently, But I've noted this. I'll see if this can be supported

Cool. If you add it, please use the  and \[ \] delimiters rather than $ $ and $$ $$. The former plays better with automated processing and currencies.

yeah sure

Nice project. Is there any plan to handle gitlab login/other kind of login as well ? For now it seems to work only with github.

Yes. The idea is to support as many git services as possible. Which includes GitLab, Gitea, Bitbucket and more

For the initial POC I have integrated it with GitHub

Do you have a docker image for self-hosting?

Yes the application is containerised also I have created the helm charts for deployment on kubernetes cluster - https://github.com/git-noter/gitnoter-charts

Definitely will give a go by deploying privately.

Does it support markdown extensions, like GitHub flavored markdown or something.

yes it supports github flavoured markdown

Could you support markdown headers like these:

---

date: 2021-09-14T22:51:33+02:00

modified: 2021-09-29T15:40:38+02:00

---

Then it would interoperate with GitJournal perfectly I think :).

Sure. I'll implement this feature

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