After Obsidian and Logseq, I give Dendron a try
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nsirap.com
I like Obsidian a lot. The text editor-like, but not quite a text editor experience seemed like the sweet spot for me. Among all of the apps I tried, it probably has the best reading experience, especially for long-form writings. But then I realized that it didn't really get me to write more notes, and it now acts more like a catalogue for things that I found online. It's just not that different from writing notes in your go-to text editor, and if VSCode couldn't make me write more notes, then neither would Obsidian.
I tried out Logseq later on, and the experience was the complete opposite. The app got me to dump my brain very quickly; writing notes actually became quite addicting. The problem is I hardly ever got back to re-reading my notes. I just never got used to the workflow of jumping through links and reading blocks that look hastily patched up together.
Wish I could find a way to make a reading experience as pleasant as Obsidian, and the writing experience that's as engaging as Logseq. A this point, though, I'm sort of stuck with these two.
I use a daily note as a starting point and then extract those into lots of other notes - maybe 20-30 each day.
I might be "using it wrong", but in that case I don't feel it's doing well at pointing me towards the right way!
I had the same experience, so I assigned a keyboard shortcuts Cmd+Shift+F and Cmd+Shift+H for global search and home, and that mitigated it a little bit. These should have had shortcuts out-of-the-box.
It's still a little awkward to get out of the search mode and back to editing mode. What would be ideal is hitting "Esc" should take you back to the listing mode and move cursor back to the last edit location.
There's nothing wrong with Obsidian per se, but that's probably the crux of my issue with it. I'm not very naturally inclined to taking notes in the first place, and Obsidian just hasn't made me take that many more notes than I used to.
Logseq on the other hand has an editor that makes it hard for you to even write longer / multi-line blocks. In some ways, I suspect that writing in bullet points or smaller blocks encourages shorter but more frequent note writing, and my brain seems to respond well to that. Obsidian can technically do that to some degree, but the editor doesn't do enough to make me write shorter and more atomic notes, even with the Outliner[0] plugin installed.
I just cannot decide :(
I'm not using the personal knowledge management bit too much yet, but as a note taking app it's great.
Moreover, the plugin ecosystem (which I've just started exploring) is excellent!
I.e. there's a plugin for downloading highlights from your Kindle books, which also creates referencable refs for each highlight and lets you easily embed them in other notes. Cool stuff.
It's also impressive that most plugins work on the mobile app too.
Basic hotkeys are modal, somehow (Open Help from sidebar. Try to use Cmd-W to close). No interface tabbing support (this app is likely an a11y fire). No proxy icons. The menu bar is supremely basic – and they don't capitalize their own app's name ("About obsidian"). The command palette calls Finder the "system explorer." Somehow no print support, anywhere. Custom context menus abound.
Best one: close the main Obsidian window on macOS and try to figure out how to reopen it. (Reopening the app is one... there's one other way!)
This might get better soon.
@kepano, the developer of Minimal, is working on a new "default theme" for Obsidian. He said it "will follow many of the same design principles as Minimal, particularly in making Obsidian feel native across platforms. It will differ in that it will prioritize accessibility and affordances more than Minimal does. In addition the new default theme will make customization and theme development easier than before."
For me though, much of the real issue is the iOS app. I feel like it needs some big modifications to how it operates in order to make quickly doing particular things a lot easier.
When I'm on my phone, the biggest thing for me is I need to take a quick note. I'd love to just open Obsidian, click a button to let me put a note in an inbox, then when I'm on my Mac I can sort the inbox like I would a task manager. I don't generally do deep work on my phone, I only really perform reference and quick notes type actions.
The OS style theme options really do wonders for making it feel more native on macOS. It’s especially nice with dark mode enabled
Light: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damiankorcz/Prism-Theme/ma...
Dark: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damiankorcz/Prism-Theme/ma...
Feels pretty macOS-like to me.
But I share their gripes, and it's similarly important to me. And I'm currently trying to choose a tool in this category to adopt.
The app will continue to be developed with Electron, however Electron does provide APIs for things like native menus. Making Obsidian feel native is a high priority currently.
The latest public release (v0.15) contained several improvements towards that goal: multiple window support, native fonts, native scrollbars, native app menus.
Currently in progress is a new default theme I am working on. I previously made Minimal[2] as a community theme, which was designed around the goal of making Obsidian feel native on macOS.
[0] https://forum.obsidian.md/c/announcements/13
Obsidian has really been a life changer for me, mostly due to Anki integration, and live mode with its support of mathjax which makes everything look so neat.
I've tried Dendron before: it's really cool, but the lack of live mode and the messiness of the notes (i.e. lack of clear hierarchy makes my head spin when navigating notes, though it's a feature not a bug for certain usecases) makes it so unappealing to me. But then again, I used it as a solely note taking app, as opposed to knowledge manager.
TLDR: You can embed excalidraw drawings/diagrams in your notes and edit them there. Moreover, inside of the excalidraw diagram you can use markdown and arbitrary obsidian references, so it composes both ways.
But time and time again I keep asking myself why. In the end, Sublime (or vim) actually is just enough for how I use Obsidian.
The only thing missing is a good reference management system; linking my own notes seems like trying to solve the wrong problem; all I really need is to keep track of what sparked those ideas/notes, and then I don't necessarily need to keep track of my thoughts;if they were meaningful I will deduce it from those references anyway.
So I just went back to Zotero for reference management. Quick notes can just go in to a big text file and then refactored later. (bonus for spaced repetition)
Obsidian is a nice app but it feels like it's a product solving the symptoms (wrong priorities in note taking) rather than a tool to support healthy habit
1: yes, you can implement this using #forward/slashes/and/tags but you lose some velocity when it's not the core organizational primitive.
Both are free and open source
So "food" is a note about food in general, "food.chinese" is a note under food that's about chineses food, "food.chinese.tao-chicken" is a note about tao-chicken under chinese-food, etc.
You can also just skip notes in the hierarchy, so you could have just "food" and "food.chinese.tao-chicken" and a placeholder "food.chinese" would appear in the graph.
I personally really liked the note/subnote model used in Zim Wiki, but that program wasn't great for code snippets or to write graphs so I'm pretty excited about Dendron. In comparison, trying to connect my notes is just such a pain with a flat system like foam and Obsidian.
[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=mermaid&tar...
Some of the time, I am tempted to go back to my original system which was just a local git repo full of Markdown files and opening the folder in Atom / VS Code.
The main reason I use Standard Notes at all is the encrypted backups to email and sync across devices. I don't think there's much more functionality required other than a decent Markdown editor for note-taking.
Same. I just opted for Joplin.
And I mean, Obsidian on Andorid is basically the desktop app taken out of electron and put into the web view as is, so I don't have high requirements here.
But Obsidian crossed the threshold and Joplin did not.
I do still use a mix of Apple Notes and Standard Notes for personal note taking. As the author mentioned, using Obsidian for both personal and work feels a bit cumbersome - especially in my case since I can't use the same Google Drive for both due to corporate policy.
The markdown notes and attachments are just plain files on my disk, they can be backed up and synced across devices. On Windows and iOS the iCloud sync works well. The notes are available offline on my phone which is a must-have feature.
I don't use many plugins, but it's great that the app is extendable like that. I've written a small syllable counter plugin myself and it was pretty easy to find my way around. Unfortunately the official docs are... lacking, so poking around other people's code was the best way to see what's what.
It's very similar to the people who constantly fiddle with dotfiles but never starting / finishing a project. There's this anxiety in doing that we cope with by doing adjacent things and fooling ourselves into believing we'll eventually do the actual thing.
So I came back to a folder of markdown files synchronized with syncthing that I edit with markor on Android and vim or vscode on desktop.
It does not have all the fancy functions of Evernote (and rest of the apps mentioned in this thread), but for just keeping a collection of notes it seems to cover the basics I need (notebooks, good search, markdown support, easy synch across clients etc).
Recently, after giving up on Obsidian, I went back to Tinderbox. This time I read the creator’s book (The Tinderbox Way) and it clicked. The programmability with agents, note prototypes, and so on really works well with what I’m doing. Linking is simple, much like roam or Obsidian.
It’s pricy and it has a bit of a steep learning curve but if you push through, it’s really powerful.
Mind mapping is a critical application of computers, still in its infancy. I have thousands of math articles in digital form that are beyond my ability to track from memory.
My primary need isn't note-taking. I want a "Finder" alternative for managing digital assets, my own folder structure that I independently store and sync. I want to wander through old papers and open them in readers on both MacOS and iOS, at the speed of daydreaming. The timing of my herd paths, and some deliberate annotations, should be my gardening influence on a largely automated process for discovering proximities. I'm still not sure what tools to use, so I slowly write my own.
May work for you. It’s taken a long while to get here but I think I finally cracked my digital note taking needs.
My one remaining need is a Tinderbox iOS/iPadOS app. Even if it’s reduced functionality, it’d allow me to get the meat of an idea down quickly.
Their tech stack also sounds dumb. I stopped using their tool on principle on top of the insane pricing.
The pricing truly is nutty. $165 a year for foldable bullet points??!! Gtfo. I wouldn't pay that much to own the app outright.
I sincerely hope they lose their lunch, and I feel bad for having recommended them to people.
I believe the tech stack is clojure, which makes a ton of sense given that the data store is basically a graph database.
The other points were though.
I got lucky and snagged the sync product before they doubled the price, so I'm grandfathered into that. But even $50/yr is a fair bit given it's really just a storage mechanism. $50 isn't that bad, but I would give a hard no at the full price of $100/yr.
Worse, the publish feature... holy insanity this thing is. $192/yr to publish a single repository.
I just don't understand at all how they came up with the pricing. If they need to make money, make the app a paid product for like $10 or $15.
Everything they put a price tag on is astronomical.
* Catalyst (for early access) $25+
* Commercial $50 per year
* Sync $8/mo ($96/yr)
* Publish $16/mo ($192/yr)
The app remains free, so it's clear they're trying to subsidize the cost of the app by cranking up the dial on the extra services, but I'd rather they just charge a reasonable price for the app and make the addon services reasonably priced. I'd be happy to pay like $10/yr for the app, and if, presumably, enough others were it would probably make them MORE money than the add-on services because a larger portion of their user base would have to pay for the app, and probably wouldn't shit a brick at $10/yr or something reasonable.
It wasn't "the guys". It was the CEO. He believes the best use of his time is monitoring Reddit threads and banning people. He posted an official policy that any negative comment or any mention of a competing app is a permanent ban - even if you're a paying customer.
I gave Roam a comprehensive evaluation last year before deciding to go with Obsidian, and paying for Obsidian Sync. I posted a short comment in one of the threads listing the reasons I didn't go with Roam. He could have learned from my comment. He could have ignored it. He banned me. A few days later, he banned Ramses Oudt, the leading community advocate for Roam, for making a negative comment.
That's a little more drama than I'd like for a notetaking app I'm paying to use.
Athens is getting there as an alternative, but I wish they were markdown-based for portability.
It's perhaps ironic that this reverses "you get what you pay for," but experience should teach all of us that these subscription type deals are strongly likely to screw you, usually through some change in the business model.
(Personally, tried org-mode in the past, have also played with Obsidian, but for me http://zim-wiki.org is the perfect combo of easy and extensible)
I find the biggest benefit for me is that it’s low friction to record things that I otherwise wouldn’t.
I have started some organization, but things that I want others to know end up elsewhere like Confluence.
I’d love to use something like Dendron in my personal life as well but I would need it to work from my phone, and be easily shared with my wife.
# NotePlan 3
Pros: Native, and so nice to use.
Cons: Bottom line: the author doubled the subscription price in the upgrade from version 2 to 3, and is experimenting with doubling the price again to $120/yr. Few plugins.
# Obsidian
Pros: Tons of useful plugins. Huge community support.
Cons: Lacking daily notes like NotePlan and Logseq. Not native.
# Logseq
Pros: Data entry is very ergonomic.
Cons: As of 2022-07, still regularly seeing updates that fix data loss. Moving toward proprietary sync service? Not native.
# iA Writer
Pros: Native. Great UI. Already paid for it. One-time purchase.
Cons: Lacks daily notes. Just recently added wiki links. No backlinks. No plugin API or Shortcuts support. No Mermaid.js diagrams.
(They do have shortcuts support, though, for whatever it's worth...)
Are you sure about Shortcuts support, though? It doesn't appear as a supported app in Shortcuts, and their website only documents x-callback-url.
But yeah, I have one that creates a datestamped note, but it's not super useful if you're not already in the app.
Obsidian has fine support for automatically creating a correctly named note, optionally pre-populated from a template, but lacks all the extra niceties. That's not a failure on its part, just something that it doesn't do as nicely out of the box as NotePlan.
I actually like how Notesnook forces you to keep your organization at 2 levels. Restricting at first it helped me simplify my workflow a lot and finding things is a breeze since I know it can't be more than 2 levels deep. For some reason I can't wrap my head around interlinking; hierarchy based organization is good enough for me.
Taking notes doesn't need anything else.
Aside: the recent news about Notesnook going open source[1] has gotten me really excited. This might actually turn out to be a notes app I stick to. Let's see where the winds blow...
Other than that, the main issue I struggle with in these PKM/Zettelkasten style note taking apps is discoverability. I write down a lot of notes, but it is hard for me to find my way back to them. The benefit of hierarchy-based notetaking systems, where things get placed in folders and subfolders, is that at least I can get a big picture of my database at a glance. I've yet to find a nice way of doing this in logseq and its cousins.
SimpleNote is missing organizational features (just has tags), but their search works well and it seems enough for personal use. Most of the new note taking apps are tackling organizational knowledge sharing and are bloated (slow and resource intensive) for the personal use case. I do use coda.io for organizing knowledge with tabular data.
For example, if I want to do some long-form writing, I can open my directory of notes in iA Writer. If I want to grep the files, I can jump to the command line.
Any note app that enforces more of a structure (requiring lists in Markdown, or with its own idiosyncratic naming scheme) is just lock-in, and within a year or two I'll be on to another app.
Full disclosure, I'm developing a very minimal iOS/Mac/commandline app with this philosophy.
But even VSCode can be slow and buggy, loaded with plugins from being used for other things. It would crash on large notes.
So I implemented the file naming scheme in my own folder, and have it open in Atom. Shift-Ctrl-F can search through all notes. Done.
All this linking of notes, creating a "knowledge graph", having a schema... is extra. It requires more effort than benefit I've EVER practically received. It's a cool hobby, and I love to organize things. But I'm trying to spend less time fiddling with tools these days.
> But for me, I don't use the mobile app much often. (...) The only thing I need is to capture a thought quickly.
I don't use the mobile app often _because_ the only thing I need to do is capture a quick thought, and it isn't very good at that. I'm still figuring out a setup with QuickAdd + Advanced URL + Tasker, but it'd be better if this was built into Obsidian's mobile app.
It’s open url where the url in my case is -> obsidian://open?vault=GTD&file=Inbox
The shortcut lives on my Home Screen.
Not sure what the android equivalent is but given androids capabilities I assume it’s even more straightforward.
Hope that helps.
Second to that is google keep, which also has that style of capturing, but doesn’t work nearly as smoothly on iOS, and has no way to integrate with another app.
Third up is Drafts for iOS, which is by far the fastest on-the-go mobile note taking app if you’re typing. They have great integrations (but for automation you have to use Shortcuts). The only reason they’re ranked third for me is their voice note story is not good enough.
You can create a little script to catch your thought and put it in a file somewhere in the Obsidian vault. You can use iOS Shortcuts or (maybe) Tasker for Android to do that.
[Ultimately my problem with logseq is that as far as I know I can't run it through a browser self-hosted. Unfortunately that's what I need at work since I can't install anything and all the remote desktop things are blocked. I'm mostly an idiot about electron but I wish it functioned like X11 forwarding where you could install an app on a port and browse to it remotely.]
Of note: My mode of writing is to collect/generate messes of ideas and then clean them up and organize them iteratively to create structure and polish. I'm one of the people who used to write on index cards and then compose by rearranging them on my bed. I loved abusing Word's outline mode for rough drafts and restructuring and refactoring text and have been trying to explain the missing functionality to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice for over a decade ("we have outline mode you just click the thing" "no it's not about creating an outline of document structure" "hey we improved outline check it out see if it looks better" loops). So when I saw some of logseq in action it was an "omg this looks even better than Word's outline mode" sort of thing. The next thing I wish logseq would do is allow you to double click to explode paragraphs and temporarily separate sentences into bullets for processing and reorganizing.
I too often feel like my brain is like Twitter/etc. I read an article, but summarize it heavily and forget the rest. I want to A: record the summary, so at least i don't forget that, and B: ideally record a few facts that lead to that summary-conlusion-thing. So if i have to rethink my conclusion i'll know what source material it came from.
Something like Building a Second Brain (with CODE and PARA) or Linking Your Thinking. The system helps, but the app enables the system.
Now I view taking notes as active learning. Highly recommend the book “how to take smart notes”
- Drafts - super fast native MacOS app that just lets you start writing text and care about "where to put it" later. I relaized that most of the "notes" or texts become either obsolete or abandoned (Draft removes them after 30 days, I think) and the task of "oh where do I put this in my knowledge tree or folder" becomes a burden. I use Drafts daily for basically everything (even writing this comment in Drafts (will copy it into NH once finished) :)
- MarginNote3 – speaking of a second brain, after trying most of the apps discussed here, I relaized that most of my knowledge lately comes from publshed papers and I need to somehow organize them, search, link and structure highlights, often across multiple documents. MarginNote is in the market of PDF readers-for-study, but it has pretty well integrated study mind-map concept and I found it working much better for me than one global "second brain" with notes.
The reasons I don't use it for my main notes app are:
- No support for backlinks. Now that I've experienced them with Obsidian et al, I don't want to do without them.
- It stores notes in a database. Obsidian and friends store them as Markdown files in the filesystem, and you can even have 2 apps sitting "on top of" the same content directory.
I like Obsidian for its community and plugins, Logseq for its ability to allow spontaneous brain dumping and dendron for its hierarchical notes and discoverability.
Flexible and no lock in whatsoever. I use something else to sync the dir and it works like a charm!
I'm now working on a tool similar to "Obsidian, Logseq and Dendron".
It came as a frustration of previous tools(I've used ALL of them). They're either not flexible enough, not light enough, not powerful enough, not portable enough etc.
So I made: https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook/
It combines both studying/references. So it's a flashcard(I don't user Supermemo algo tho) + Notetaking. It's also built on a standard so you can develop commandline/mobile/toaster app that is compatible.
I think there might be a few hundred if not a few thousand of them now. I’m realized and gave up :/
As long as the tool you created is useful for yourself and that’s sufficient for you, you should be golden. Otherwise it’s a potential world of pain!
I understand your point and I kinda agree, but this is really a long-term project, particularly the standard.
This is based off the idea that browsers might die, but HTTP will live on.
The same principle applied here, this tool in particular might die out and rot, but the standard/protocol will live on!
I consider it the spiritual successor to emacs org-mode.
- outliner
- open source and free
- 100% offline (good for notes at bigcorp)
- flat files + git
- plugin marketplace (like vscode)
- Good Mobile App
Only current downside is some issues with cross device syncing, but that’s coming out soon.
You need a commercial license to use obsidian at work FYI.
It has reliable sync using iCloud, markdown, nested tags, integrates in the browsers for clips, supports images and is pretty fast.
The big downside is that it's for OSX only but since I'm always in the Apple ecosystem (and have my iPad/iPhone with all the time me anyway), it's perfect for me. There is a web app in the works as well AFAIK but it's a long time coming..
Bonus points: use the Nebo app on iPad with the Apple pencil to sketch and export to Bear.
If you are on OSX, I highly recommend it!
In addition, there's the excellent vim plugin https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim that allows fuzzy search of notes in vim.
I have a link saved to sync Noteplan 3 (Apple ecosystem only) with Obsidian. I have my Noteplan folder indexed with DEVONthink (Apple ecosystem only) so that syncs up. Having Logseq sync up would be cool too.
I think what separates TiddlyWiki and Org-mode from the rest is that they are easily "hackable" and have more powerful syntax, but are also more demanding on the user.
You can modify the UI and add features inside TiddlyWiki itself, using only TiddlyWiki syntax and Javascript. Like if you want backlinks to be displayed at the bottom of every note in a certain way, you can do that.
Markdown is a very limited language when you think about it. (Most of these tools would be better off using AsciiDoc.) TiddlyWiki's WikiText has macros and widgets that let you do things Markdown never will, and your "notes" can become interactive and dynamic.
See e.g. <https://groktiddlywiki.com/static/Macros.html> and <https://groktiddlywiki.com/static/Widgets.html>.
TiddlyWiki allows you to create a very sophisticated, tailored system for managing lots of different things. But when you begin, it's a pretty steep learning curve, and you'll need to put in more work than when starting with Obsidian, of course.
I am currently evaluating Joplin.
Hierarchies are good, but we should dynamically generate them from content, not hardcode them as filenames.
I use Google Sheets and Keep. Sheets because I can dump photos, use formulas, paste links and Keep for jotting down some quick thoughts.
Can anyone recommend something similar? I would like to move everything to the same app where I could sync with my server of choice.
[I found one OneNote -> Obsidian script a few years ago but it was very buggy.]
(The only unchecked box is that data is stored in a database instead of markdown files, but I decided to let go of that one.)
Edit: Funny, this thread is discussing two different Outlines. I’m talking about https://www.getoutline.com/.
The current one liner: dendron is an open source, developer focused note taking tool that lets you quickly find and organize your notes in vscode using flexible hierarchies.
Given a few more lines, I would add: what IDEs do for programming languages, we want to do for knowledge - that is to say, give you the tooling to manage large amounts of it using concepts like refactoring, lookup, and schemas (think of this as type definitions but for the structure of your notes)
Presumably it beats your stack because it's all bundled together in a convenient package.
(In case it isn't: links, rendering, and stuff like the graph that gets constructed as you link are _very_ helpful to my workflow)
For instance, dataview plugin can query other notes and render result in place. So for example, you have a few notes with a tag "book-review". And in them you use YAML preamble to track rating you gave the book. Dataview can render you a list of books you reviewed and their ratings (even in star form), individual rows linking to the specific notes.
Another example, built-in TeX rendering support, which makes it much easier to read math formulas. Likewise, built-in Mermaid for diagrams.