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Comment by s1mon | Hacker News Reader

As evidenced by a link to AlternativeTo on their own site, this space has a lot (145+) of competition [0]. At some level, I worry about using things much more complex than a text file, because of portability and longevity. It's enough of a pain transitioning between Google and Microsoft (and back) every few years based on various jobs.

I have files from the late 1980's that I can still read, but only with Libre Office because Apple's supplied apps can't read old MacWrite files.

Some people swear by OneNote or Notion or Keep or various mind mapping software, but keeping things cross platform and simple is a challenge. I was never an Evernote person, but it sounds like that turned into a bit of a debacle. These tools work for now, but will they work 5 or 10 years from now?

[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/obsidian/

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That's kinda the biggest selling point of Obsidian...? It's all just markdown files. Markdown is a standard format, so you can open it in many other apps as well.

Markdown is fine for formatting text, not convinced it's great for knowledge management.

Formatting and knowledge management are somewhat orthogonal concepts, aren't they? You store information in a textfile, have rendering thereof based on Markdown, and another layer to reference and index files.

Which is basically my point!

I disagree; I think a system like Wikipedia shows that a textual and visual format like markdown provides the flexibility to convey pretty much any information. For any formal and semantic storage system, you will probably spend more time adapting it to each specific use case than to actually fill it with content.

yet has no metadata or any semantics, its basically just how you layout text ...

it can, using plugins. i.e. i use schema.org's things as fileClasses, which are enforced using a metadata schema for attributes which are extensible and excludable. My ontology is based on FRBRoo and I have link visualization for ease of reading.

Org-mode works well. It is essentially just a markup like Markdown.

it works well for laying out information for reading, and has some additional markup beyond just layout (unlike markdown), I'd argue it is fairly rudimentary and not extensible.

It's extensible in other ways.. but either way i'm moving back to Obsidian due to constantly tinkering and trying to improve my "experience" on Emacs. Obsidian gets me 90% of the way there without much fuss. It has far better image handling, and with Canvas - the possibility to lay out my own notes in various configurations is nigh endless.

I agree. Markdown is way too much overrated as a multi purpose document format. I find it very limiting even w/ Obsidian. It would probably work well for some text-people, but anything more complicated than 1D character stream won't fit well into Markdown.

So what would you prefer?

The thing is that if you want something portable where if the app goes down you can still use it, you don't have many options. There aren't really any formats that support the kind of note linking used in PKM by default, besides maybe HTML but if you think that's a better solution than markdown I think we have a difference in values that can't really be remedied here. So assuming you're not using HTML, now you're looking for a common format that is easily parsed so that you can have links, and also simple enough that you can look at it on pretty much any PC. That really only leaves markdown and plaintext (and maybe JSON? But again, same as HTML, that technically works but it doesn't really fit the bill here), and markdown is just better for notetaking

On the other hand, the fact that there are so many Markdown-based editors that can read the files you create in Obsidian gives plain text format more resilience over time. Even if Obsidian were to disappear, your writing and ideas will still be accessible in the future.

Also I would argue that you can rather simply write a parser for the basic markdown syntax and convert it to e.g. HTML or plain text if necessary by getting rid of markdown specific syntax.

Maybe many people on HN can do this. A lot fewer people than that on HN want to do it. And many people who use Markdown outside of HN can't do it.

Realistically, only a few people have to do it and open source a toolkit. Also I don’t really think that we’ll have that issue with markdown because it’s widespread and rather well established. This doesn’t invalidate your point, which I absolutely agree with.

Also it’s not true for the file format for canvas which is probably way harder to parse correctly.

Way harder means what? An extra 3 days of effort to the future open source Obsidian clone?

Or use pandoc[0] to convert a markdown file to an HTML file (and many other file types)

[0]: https://pandoc.org/

Markdown is plain text, with conventions. To lose the ability ti see your data would requiring us to lose utf8 encoding which is unlikely as it is self perpetuating.

If I may interject, AlternativeTo is a pretty shallow platform for finding alternatives (I do wonder if you even checked their listings), and it's also biased - run by a moderator team that can deny/approve listings as they please.

Well, what's the alternative to AlternativeTo then?

https://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/

This made me laugh.

Wonder if AlternativeTo is listed as an alternative to AlternativeTo?

> AlternativeTo is a pretty shallow platform

I've found AlternativeTo to be the complete opposite of shallow. In most cases its pretty precise in exhaustively listing every viable software alternative, which abundant filter options. Even if the ordering is "biased" (which I haven't really encountered), the site is quite useful without having many alternatives itself.

I'm also worried by this, which is precisely why I'm considering a move to Obsidian from Notion. I'm pretty much writing everything in Markdown by now, including my personal blog.

How is moving from Obsidian to Notion relevant? They're basically the same thing?

The difference is with a local-first editor (like Obsidian) you hopefully get to keep your files if the company stops being nice

I keep losing my files with cloud-first systems. I had a trove of notes in Evernote and I don't even remember which email I used to open it, nor if they are there anymore. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't lose local-first markdown files, as I could do the same thing I do with code: keep them in git, and then have a cloud backup for good measure.

Ah, i didn't realize you said TO obsidian. For some reason I read it as the other way around, which is why it really confused me.

From FOSS alternatives listed there, LogSeq [1] looks quite promissing! It also mentiones canvas feature in their docs [2] (which are written as LogSeq graph, too). I am still evaluating it but so far so good, it even has an Android app (as a pre-release on GitHub).

[1] https://logseq.com [2] https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/whiteboard

Not everything needs to live for decades. Sometimes the ephemeral capture is just as important in sorting out your ideas.

What doesn't work for me with these tools is that once I've gone deep I still need a tool that offers the absolute MINIMUM friction in its interface and for me nothing has conquered an A3 sheet and a box of coloured pencils.

Perhaps I should invest my time in really learning one of these tools but they never seem to be seamless enough to pose a real challenge to a pen and paper. Maybe if I had a Wacom tablet...?

A drawing tablet helped me some, when I paired it with Xournal++. I think there are apps for iOS and Android tablets with nicer and faster interfaces, but I don't use tablets, so they didn't help. But the ability to quickly select a group of pen strokes and just move them around to make new room, as well as the ability to quickly paste screenshots of anything I was doing anywhere else on my computer made a big difference.

i bought a remarkable tablet for that purpose but still failed to adopt it.

Yeah, the Remarkable looks like the most likely candidate to be able to displace a sheet of paper but my hangup is that the lack of colour will hinder its usability too much for me. I always use a few coloured pens when I scribble my notes.

I went paperless this year as an engi student with dendron, xournal++, a (used) wacom tablet, and some pdf editors. The main benefits were avoiding scanning, instantly being able to reorganize or copy/paste diagrams, and not having to carry notebooks. Pencil or pen and paper still feels the best but in order to keep everything digital, this was reliable and cheaper than an ipad or tablet. https://alternativeto.net/list/34598/paperless-student/

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