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Comment by nyreed | Hacker News Reader

My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well.

I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.

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I went from Notion to Joplin for note taking: I drop 1000s of images in a note and annotate them and publish them. Notion crashed all the time; so badly that support apologised and had to delete things for me. Joplin has 0 issues with it; it scrolls super fast, is a pleasure to work with. Also on a m1. I cannot say I noticed any bad behaviour compared to others, included Obsidian.

I went from Notion and Joplin to Obsidian mostly because Obsidian stores stuff as regular files on my filesystem and I can easily interact with them with external programs and scripts.

Joplin, while being open source itself, has a "proprietary"[1] storage format I can't be arsed to figure out how to interact with.

[1] Meaning non-standard in this case, Joplin is the only software using Joplin's storage method

is there anything with a lightweight learning curve akin to Obsidian that uses a accessible format?

Any text editor with markdown support should work. Just VS Code with a Markdown viewer is a decent replacement.

You don't _need_ all of the fancy plugins that Obsidian has, but some of them are genuinely useful.

It's "just" a SQLite database, I wrote a small Python script to extract my Joplin notes to a static site:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/

On the other hand Obsidian markdown with front-matter can be fed pretty much directly to a static site generator.

Sqlite does give some speed improvements and makes searching easier.

It’s SQLite; arguable the format most fast custom storage format requiring software (games notably) should use instead of rolling their own.

That’s exactly why I’m building a note-taking app in Qt C++ and QML that is vastly more performant than other note-taking apps[1].

This degradation of software by web apps shows in the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Plume looks neat!

What is the pricing model you have in mind?

Thanks!

It will be a subscription model. $25 paid yearly or $3 monthly (that’s the idea for now).

Plume looks very interesting! One place I personally find many apps in this category fall down is their ability to handle pdf’s embedded or attached within notes gracefully. This applies to desktop and mobile apps.

This may be a slightly weird use case but I accumulate tons of pdf’s that are often relevant to my notes and want them easily embedded and viewable in a first class way. Obsidian is a great example of how not to handle a pdf locking it to a small portion of the window and not allowing it to be full screened.

Forcing the user to dump all of their pdf’s into something like google drive locked away from the rest of their notes is a crappy experience and h fortunately keeps me using apps like evernote purely for this functionality.

Thanks! Hmm, I've seen many open-source Qt apps integrate PDF support, so I guess I can study them. I'm adding this to the to-do list. How do you usually add a PDF to your notes? Drag and drop? What's the ideal way you look to interact with it? You said no full-screen, so what it does look like?

If you need pdf viewing and management (indexing, annotations, citations), it might be useful to look into citation managers, which are built to do exactly these things: check out Zotero.

I am working on a knowledge structuring tool as well; will silent release soon: limandoc.com

You can put all your documents/PDFs there and structure them as you wish. And it will be syncing locally only!

Nice that's exactly what I'm looking for, as I use KDE and Qt apps fit in so well.

Will the client side be open source? I hope so because I'm on FreeBSD so you probably won't make a compiled version :)

Plume is actually based on my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. You can already get it on Flathub, Snap Store etc. Notes uses just a simple plain text editor while Plume has a completely revamped block editor that I built from scratch. That parts of Notes used in Plume will remain open source (per the MPL license) but the rest of the code will be closed source. At least for the time being.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

Ah too bad, I do need a rich text notes app (and no markdown, I hate markdown, under the hood it's fine but I don't want to deal with it :) ). Also hate kanban and agile methodology by the way ;) Luckily I'm not a dev otherwise I would have to work with all of those lol.

But perhaps you could do the monetisation via the sync service only and make the app open source :) That would be great, at least for me so I could compile it on FreeBSD. Some others do this, like Obsidian, for which there's an actual BSD port. But it's electron, sadly. But I understand... It's a tiny niche. I'll keep looking.

Of course I can't use flatpak and snap. And I can't stand snaps so no way I'd use that. Flatpaks are a bit better but not working on BSD.

I really used to love tomboy. It was fast, rich text, would automatically hyperlink notes together as you typed, it was so great. But they stopped development on it. There were a few reboots but they were complete rewrites and lacked all the speed and smoothness I loved.

Is it a deal breaker for you that the app isn't open source? What if I create binaries for FreeBSD/your distro and there's no telemetry/option to disable connecting to the internet (even for updates)?

I support your app so much I would pay a monthly fee instead of a one-time purchase. My notes are as valuable as my life. I don't mind the app being proprietary if it gets the love it deserves. If you can accomplish the goals you set out, like providing good functionality and performance, then I'm cheering you on. My needs are very basic, just the minimum to accomplish Zettelkasten.

That's nice to hear. Same here, I have thousands of notes, it's my second brain. Sign up for the waitlist, I'd love you to try Plume when it's out.

That would work perfectly yes! It's not the internet connection that bothers me (in fact I'd probably use the sync).

But usually developers don't care enough about the tiny userbase of FreeBSD to even consider that. If you would do that, I would really like it, though I can imagine that from a time/gains perspective there is no point. Which I do totally understand.

One thing I like is that your monthly fee is very reasonable. Obsidian costs double the price of my entire Microsoft 365 subscription :) Besides it being electron that's another issue for me. Especially because it's just not really that great.

That's awesome to hear, then. I'll see what I can do (:

I don't mind using a closed source solution - but only if I can keep my notes separated from the application itself. Makes it easy for me to back up my notes and to use versioning tools like git. It also allows me to use bash to manipulate my notes independently of the application at any given time.

Plume seems very pretty - good job on that, but....

"All notes in Plume are simple plaintext strings under the hood. Right now, all these plaintext strings are stored in a SQLite database locally on your computer. But we have plans to remove the reliance on a custom database and to store all notes as simple .txt files inside a folder."

I've been burned too many times by organizational tools that like to keep your notes internally stored within their systems.

Gotcha, no worries, I'm 100% going to migrate the database to a simple arbitrary folder with .md/.txt files. I also want that for myself. It will take a few months of work after the initial release, tho.

A SQLite database is not really proprietary though. It's easy to work with. And perhaps there is an export function too in case you want to move.

There's Qownnote too, it's really nice and open source.

Oh yeah good point. I never checked that one out because I don't really use owncloud but it's worth a look.

> This degradation of software by web apps shows the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times.

A-fucking-men. Web tools are for building web apps, software tools are for building software. I avoid all these goddamn electron things like the plague if at all fucking possible.

Garbage on phones, garbage on computers, garbage on tablets. Garbage.

It's unfortunately very hard to avoid them. But indeed, on macOS, I try to find only native or native-like apps for my needs. It's the difference between a healthy diet and junk food for my computer.

will the mobile all be fast as well?

my issue is i can’t find a platform with a fast mobile app

it seems they’re all react native

I didn't yet try to create a mobile version, but I don't see why, as Qt Quick is very performant. I guess we'll have to wait till I port it and do some testing.

Scrolling in the webpage crashed my browser (Firefox, ios).

Weird, it seems to work fine for me (Firefox, iOS).

yeah, it goes to show you that Electron based apps can be done in a reasonably performant way but it does require extra care/attention as Obsidian is an electron app as well.

I have about 13,000 notes (with embedded media PNGs, MP4s, etc) across 50 folders/subfolders on my Mac M1 and searching across all notes in Obsidian is for all intents and purposes instantaneous (less than a second).

Does Obsidian feature a way to seamlessly sync between devices that doesn't rely on a propreitary service or external tool (Syncthing)?

Obsidian has a built in sync feature if you pay for it. https://obsidian.md/sync

Every time I see a post about a note-taking app, Obsidian is mentioned in the comments. I don't know if the app is really good, or if those are just paid comments. At this point I'm not even surprised anymore, especially when conversations always end with a mention of Obsidian Sync.

It's because there are two ways to sync content across devices, paid sync through Obsidian vs. git. Given sync is a p0 feature, it seems logical that both get mentioned when the question arises.

Also, the app's really good, and I pay for Sync -- git works well, but it's a bit clumsier on iOS. Never posted a paid comment in my life.

That's not all the ways to sync.

I share the vault folder between devices with syncthing. Free and open source.

It's the biggest & most popular app in the note-taking space. It's closed-source, which I don't love, and I've tried to look for alternatives, but there just isn't anything else that's as good as Obsidian. In a situation like that, you don't need to pay people to talk about your product. People will evangelize it on their own.

Try SiYuan Note.

I sync Obsidian with iCloud Drive and it's been 100% reliable and very fast so far (a few months).

You can use a plugin to sync to git repo. Folders in obsidian are really folder on disk and. In git.

At this point you could hook up ci for instance to publish a blog folder etc

Hmm, why not do one thing and do it well? Is there much benefit for each and every app to reimplement its own seamless sync?

I think in a lot of cases it's a means of monetizing an app where everything else is essentially free/full-featured without being behind a paywall

What's left if you take out "proprietary service" and "external tool"?

Joplin released an ARM build a few months back -- so if you were using the pre-arm build it was bad, so just throwing this out there for folks who maybe had similar experiences -- make sure you are using the arm build (it should happen automatically now)

Disclaimer: I've contributed to Joplin in the past, and I use it dozens of times a day with no big speed complaints.

I use it on Linux and it's always really snappy and a pleasure to use.

I wish I could compile those electron apps from source à la FreeBSD’s ports or whatever. I’d rather have the laptop compiling for a few days than using electron

How does compiling from source help you avoid electron?

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