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Comment by IceWreck | Hacker News Reader

I am quite obsessed with keeping a personal wiki, like some of these people described in the article. However, I simply cannot imagine doing that in an application that isn't controlled by me or doesn't work completely offline. I dont want my life to be organized around an application that charges a subscription and my workflow is at the whim of a corporation.

I went from Zim to Dokuwiki to Bookstack (where I've been for the past 3 years). The former is an offline app and the latter two are self hosted. All three are FOSS.

Anyways, I did try Notion once, it was super slow (feels sluggish) and the search was bad.

Edit: after reading some other comments, one thing I really appreciate about Bookstack is that its opinionated and batteries included -> no falling into the "waste all your time customizing and perfecting your workflow" trap.

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I'll throw tiddlywiki into the ring for the 'list of things to try', it is pretty neat and I like how it is all contained in a single file and it's really fun to explore inside of it.

But I also landed on bookstack. Weird how it turned out that formatting my stuff like a book would be the best format as opposed to all the super cool different ways of thinking that are possible with new-gen apps. I'm not sure if books are just superior or if I just personally am really wired to books, but I landed on it after evernote, onenote, obsidian, joplin, and Notion.

Basically I am using tiddly as a zettelkastan where appropriate and bookstack for things that are more finalized.

I really wish my team would switch to BS instead of the unorganized knowledgebase soup with inconsistent tagging, zero curation, and bad search engine (servicenow knowledge). omg what if we had an actual procedure manual instead of just hoping people will enter the right search terms to land on KBs they dont even know to search for. now THAT would be revolutionary.

> Weird how it turned out that formatting my stuff like a book would be the best format as opposed to all the super cool different ways of thinking that are possible with new-gen apps.

BookStack dev here. When originally building BookStack, I did initially built it with infinitely nestable pages since it seemed like the "technically better" approach that didn't limit user content, but in use it just made UX and discovery a pain, especially for the mixed-technical-skill workplace environment I was targeting, which is when I landed on the book > [chapter >] page setup (With shelves being a late awkward addition based upon demand). Good to hear that works for you. Is often the love-it-or-hate-it factor of the platform.

Have you tried Joplin?

It's markdown, allows copy pasting images, embeding files like PDF with preview, works offline by syncing using apple/google/microsoft/dropbox cloud storage.

Has desktop and mobile app.

Free and Open Source.

Joplin is excellent.

You can run your own sync server and not rely on cloud storage at all (there's a docker image - very simple to set up). It also imports and exports a hierarchy of folders/markdown files, so on- and off-boarding are simple.

For many years I used plain old markdown files and either git or syncthing to ship them around, but the editing and viewing experience was never great, and sync on iOS wasn't exactly seamless.

The other big benefit is cross-note search. Previously I had to rely on the editor I was using - which was fine on a desktop with VSCode, but nonexistent on mobile.

Have you ever looked at task warrior? https://taskwarrior.org (and you could host it online yourself (I believe) with inthe.am - https://github.com/coddingtonbear/inthe.am if you aren't comfortable with the existing version)

It's well documented ( https://taskwarrior.org/docs/ ) had enables a number of different workflows and export and import options (I've dabbled with jira imports to task warrior for my own sorting views).

I used Taskwarrior before and found it worked pretty well for tasks but not for longer notes or tasks that need a lot of description. I used it for a few years before moving to Org Mode for tasks and Tiddlywiki for my knowledgebase.

Maybe try Obsidian? It works completely offline, it's free, and its stores your data as a folder of markdown files. It should cover your personal wiki / Zettelkasten needs, plus, if you're willing to spend some time on learning the Tasks plugin, you can implement a pretty decent GTD-like system on it.

Also, if you're in the Apple ecosystem, you can store your obsidian vault in iCloud and sync between laptop & mobile. The obsidian mobile app is surprisingly good too.

I similarly am obsessed with maintaining my own knowledgebase and wanted it to be self hosted and open source.

I was looking at setting up a wiki and considered Dokuwiki and Bookstack. I ended up using Tiddlywiki, which is by default a single user wiki that is actually just a single HTML file that defines the whole app and the wiki contents. This means that all you need to run it is a browser that can read HTML and run JS.

I since migrated from running it as a single HTML file to a Node.js server to enable better version tracking with Git and to make saving updates less cumbersome. It's a little wonky to save updates to the single-file version without a custom browser plugin or app.

Anyways, at some point I might try migrating to a more traditional wiki solution as I like the idea of being able to share parts of my wiki with others. But for now Tiddlywiki works nicely for me!

Notion still does have pretty bad performance, although I believe they’ve recently upgraded the search. It’s quite good at least in my experience.

Can I ask what determined you to move away from Zim? I'm currently using it and finding it quite good.

The MacOS app was unusable when I tried it

Zim was cool but I wanted something that could work on multiple systems without waiting for files to sync and bookstack works over the web.

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