Logseq: Privacy-First, Joyful Platform for Knowledge Management
logseq.com
logseq.com
I've done all my planning and note taking using plain text files for years, and never had the need for these complex tools. I tried Roam and Obsidian because of the hype, logging and connecting everything I read for a few months, but then I burned out and realized they don't help me at all. Most of the value from note taking I get is by writing notes, not by managing them or looking them up later. I'd almost never look up stuff again so all this management effort is wasted. And if I need to find something I can either use Google (no need to keep track of links) or it's so obvious that I can do a simple text keyword search through my notes.
Can someone explain why these tools are so great?
Personally I find myself revisiting old notes rather often for a variety of reasons: - writing annual feedback reports on my peers: by taking brief notes in LogSeq journals tagged with their names I can quickly accumulate feedback on how they did over the year or things they could improve - the above applies to self-assessments which are often required when asking for a raise or promotion in a “ok why? What did you achieve this year?” - solving issues specific to my workplace and workflows: while Google and StackOverflow will likely cover 90% of issues you have an arguably there’s no much value in writing about those solutions I often encounter problems specific to my workplace’s infrastructure or services. Taking notes and writing snippets on those is something I often revisit
Top of my head the above reasons make the process worth it for me
However, when needed, it is there. Here is a tiny tip I found a few days back -- try Obsidian with the Plugin Omnisearch[1]. I'm surprised why this is not built-in like Sublime Text. These tools are a beautiful sanctuary -- a happy place -- if you will, for you to write and be at home.
> I use Obsidian but never cared about neither the mapping/backlinks, logging, etc.
This is exactly why I built the plugin :) It's not that I don't care about tags/links/etc., but every time I tried to use those tools, it was a write-only process. I'll never remember how a note is tagged, or in what folder I "smartly" put it in.
People consider search as a clutch for a lack of organization, but more often than not, these same people spend all their time refining their workflow, try new methods with fancy names, and treat organization as a goal in itself. _That_ I don't care about, I just want to write notes like post-its on a desk, and quickly find them when I need them.
I’m using simple note taking apps now.
“Just type a hash in front of anything you want to be a heading”… wouldn’t fare well in the average ‘parent test’.
Don't confuse complexity with familiarity.
I do refer to and maintain my org files to some extent. Typically I'll get interested in some topic start an org file where I mostly save links haphazardly, with brief comments. I don't put serious effort into cross-linking related entries which a bunch of notes apps seem to expect you to do. That seems like a waste of time. The org files are just info dumps where I throw whatever info I find into a bin of related items. Once or twice I've written something up for publication based on the notes in one of those files, but that meant writing actual words and sentences in an organized sequence, not cross-linking a bunch of notes to each other.
In Notes, I just need to start a new note and type.
I’ve been trying to move back to Notes recently.
Obsidian become messy quickly: the temptation to try new ways of working just ended up doing my head in.
Some people can make it work, but the whole thing is fragile. The usual response on the subreddit is ‘you’re doing it wrong’, or ‘you need to be more committed’. Both answers are wrong: people capture, categorise and retrieve information differently and in differ contexts each time.
I learnt to be comfortable with losing information.
I need the info to be available to me on multiple pcs and even better from my phone so I can refer to common things immediately.
I write down stuff that I know works correctly, but have to use very infrequently -- my tmux config or the correct network config so hyperv will work.
I use Notion for tons of stuff like that.
I use Miro (diagraming app) when I am trying to understand complex stuff for the first time -- where there are tons dependencies and I have no clue what is going on like an existing large codebase.
Text files tend to become very limiting in how you can express and present the information back to yourself in a meaningful way.
Back when I was doing my PhD, I had lots of PDFs and I had a workflow to mark interesting parts and export them to org-mode with backlinks to the PDF and the citation information. That was already enough for me, although I could imagine I could have used orgmode or another tool for improving the organizing, expanding and reusing of the information.
Nowadays, I mostly care about noting down decisions and action items, primarily in the context of meetings. None of these tools give me an advantage. OneNote on the other hand, despite its shortcomings, integrates with other tools we are using at work and allows sharing with colleagues, which at least is marginally better than a plain text file. Most of the stuff I note down are not relevant within a year, so I don't care about the format, the linking and so on, as long as I can find what I need.
I've tried some techniques or tools after reading HN posts like this one in the past, but I've now accepted that this is not for me. I've decided less note-taking is better and that the medium is not important.
I've started keeping all my notes in Logseq because being able to pull up a map of all my research about, say, small-plot intensive farming, the three times I've really gotten into that topic over the last 15 years and quickly review what I had already learned saves me so much time. I can expand on previous research rather than forgetting I'd already reviewed some particular source and duplicating the research.
I can't do that yet because I've only been using Logseq for about a year, but I don't expect my personality is going to change enough in the future that this will stop being amazingly useful!
I think if you assume a world where everyone keeps notes, then these just seem like systems for people that do not have one. But for those that have kept notes, these apps do offer some innovation over the plainest of plain text systems.
The thing about my note-taking has always been that I'm creating lists with increasingly nested bullet points, with some occasional prose in-between. The problem being that lists go down on the page (as you add new stuff at the top) and get forgotten. I haven't realized - until recently, that is - that outliner tools are actually created for this very use-case.
I'm specifically not interested in the knowledge-base use-case. It's more like creating lists with points being current thoughts, topics, and ideas, and the sub-bullets being new realisations/further thoughts about the point, with the list occasionally getting very deeply nested. Something akin to discussing with yourself.
Having now given Logseq a try, it looks like it's much closer to the increasingly-nested lists workflow I've been looking for. One of the bigger discoveries was the "turn this block into its own page" command, that kind of made the tool click and is a very good solution for when the lists get too deeply nested.
Btw, what do people recommend for sync? I've heard of data-loss being a common problem with standard cloud sync.
I love syncthing itself though! I used to use resilio sync and syncthing is so much better.
Just saying this to let you know that their sync is reasonably far along in development and one option would be to wait it out.
Oh my. I've been considering trying it out, but I'm not that high.
Sync via Syncthing has problems with conflict resolution, unfortunately (but I think these could be reasonably easily resolved).
I would really urge these companies to try to find a better way. You can’t bend your users over that want seamless sync. Take a little from a larger user base so you aren’t charging so damn much for sync. It’s ridiculous.
Charge $12 a year for some common features as a base package. If users want to go higher up add sync at a reasonable price and give them the same features plus sync.
Sync pricing shouldn’t subsidize free users, at least in my opinion.
I’m asking in case I’m missing something special that would make me try RemNote.
What resources do other users find most useful for Advanced Query documentation and discussion? The official documentation is bleak. I've become comfortable with Datascript and for the most part built out what I need. But nearly all of the really helpful insights and tips have come from random gists and forum posts none of which I have seen in any documentation. Most Google searches bring up pages of examples that are exact copy/pastes of other pages, gists...
Btw, it is also possible to stay with just Obsidian and few good plugins to accomplish the tasks such as Outlining, Mindmaping, and PDF Annotations.
Sometimes, I even use iA Writer in focus mode just to keep writing on a particular note.
I like this quote I stole from somewhere, “You are only truly digitally free when your notes can stand alone, independent of any one app.”
There are, however, some annoyances left; for example, the support for ordinary checkboxes (not todo elements) is surprisingly limited for a software based on lists
- This is an item
* [ ] This is an open checkbox
* [X] This is a checked checkbox
- [ ] This is a checkbox
I just got used to apply LATER everywhere.
Thank you for expanding this
I spend hours every day reading epubs, highlighting them, adding notes. It's almost all in KOReader, but it ends up trapped there.
When I highlight and annotate PDFs in Logseq, they become connected with allllll my other notes. I even got a system running for scanning paper I receive to PDF, adding an OCR layer, and importing to Logseq.
But I spend something like 200x the amount of time reading epubs as PDFs and I haven't found any local/FOSS tool that can bridge this gap.
Making web annotations in PDFs is either coordinate based (page + rectangles) or text bases (quoted text). The quoted text in PDFs is error-prone because PDF is a layout format. Text quotations are more precise in epubs.
The base url for such annotations should be content-addressable storage, i.e. a hash instead of a plain url.
https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere...
i have an ancient PKM that i used to edit with vim. recently i installed Obsidian, Dendron, Logseq and a few others and just hopped between these daily to manage that PKM instead. Logseq’s journalling and time-tracking is a beauty, but you can’t use it on a PKM worked on by other tools without it stripping every blank line from your Markdown files and converting every top-level item to a bullet point.
in the end i always return to Obsidian. it plays nicely in any multi-tool environment i’ve dreamt up: it’s super easy to switch to, and a decade from now should i have a reason to, away from.
1. Not designed from the ground-up to prevent data loss. Has had data-loss issues in the past.
<strikethrough>2. An electron app that doesn't let you open multiple documents at once. (edit: nevermind, seems like they did lots of feature development here)</strikethrough>
That said, I don't know of any other good local-first outliners (i.e. like Workflowy).
So far I've seen that there are tabs, you can open a document in the sidebar, and you can also open multiple windows.
Indexing and general responsiveness slows down massively once you have a few million words stored, and you have to break up your data into many smaller notes or you'll suffer even greater slowdown. Despite this I'm putting up with it at the moment because they seem to be making good progress improving the app and it's open-source unlike many of their competitors.
I've personally found browsing websites or even notes in Obsidian to frequently be overwhelming. Switching to an outliner like Logseq really helps ground me and gives my brain room to realign itself on the screen. In particular, being able to click on a single bullet point and make that the app's focus is really the most helpful. If I'm distracted, I have huge struggles remembering what I was looking at before, but with Logseq I can just look at what's focused and I'm good again.
List manipulation features feels much better too. I may type a giant pile of bullets in one place and later realise I want them elsewhere. This is possible in Obsidian, but feels better in Logseq, with lots of keyboard shortcuts and mouse shortcuts available.
Care to elaborate how you came to this conclusion?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27514005
There are enough people with ADHD posting or commenting that I favour HN for such information and discussion over others
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Remember that if you use and like Logseq you can sponsor it: https://opencollective.com/logseq
For me the Holy Grail of note-taking app would be:
- free and open source
- offline first
- encrypted sync
- collaborative
- backlinks and cool things like logseq queries
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying but I want to be able to collaborate with anyone. As an example, my mom wouldn't be interested in paying for a software that she would barely use even if it's a software that I can't live without.
According to [1] they don't plan to open source it due to "business considerations."
I'm not against people making a buck, but as far as I understand this isn't permitted by the AGPL, which logseq's current authors are bound to as much as anyone else. (Unless they have all past contributors grant them a secondary license.)
It's likely the sync protocol will be reimplemented for self-hosting, but I'd assume the mobile apps will hardcode the server address to encourage use of their paid sync service.
1: https://discuss.logseq.com/t/what-is-the-logseq-open-source-...
The MarkDown files it generates aren't compatible with other similar programs (Obsidian for instance). It adds 2 spaces which makes thins incompatible with others.
This is the major advantage of Obsidian, it is not too much opiniated about how the RAW file should look. Which makes moving form one editor to other pretty easy.
The sync story is a little clunky, though. For now, I've mounted my Google Drive to a local dir and use that store my Logseq notes.
(The plugin API still feels a little quirky, though)
I wrote a plugin for openai gpt3 https://github.com/briansunter/logseq-plugin-gpt3-openai
Looks like there's an open issue on github for the same feature request:
- https://github.com/logseq/logseq/issues/4592
(but there are currently 1.8k open issues)
I also have tags for learning, tags for management, some blocks have multiple tags. In general, it's a powerful worklog that evolves into a knowledge base.
Thanks to the tagging system, I actually find what. I'm looking for
I publish my logseq graph online here https://briansunter.com/graph
I create a GitHub repository and create a markdown file and then I create numbered markdown headings for each entry. For each entry I journal my thought. I try trigger the same idea in myself from reading the thought.
When I get to 100-400 entries I create a new repository and repeat the process.
My computer journals are all created and published in the open on GitHub you can find links in my profile. I am interested in futuristic computer integrations and parallelism.
I update the journal multiple times throughout the day or week. If someone visits only ever once they might not see entries I add during the week.
I only share the journal when I fill it up to 100-400.
It would be nice to discover people who have notes with the same keywords or who have annotated the same sentences in an article.
Medium offers some of that but it's only on medium articles, and it's not possible to intersect annotations and notes. E.g. how could I find people who have an 80% overlap of interest in a set of articles that I have curated on some topic?
I checked the FAQ, but the wording is not very clear as to whether they will be fully featured and allow full user control over these two critical features
If so, how do you do it?
EDIT: Main website loaded and the Live demo seems to work.
I'm not 12, please don't patronise me.