Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

Pros/exciting things:

1) There's a simplicity in using VS Code for writing notes and docs if (and probably only if) you already spend your day in VS Code, like I do.

2) The Markdown Preview Enhanced VS Code extension (which is a dependency of Dendron) is super cool for having so many "batteries" included. For example, check out all the diagram types it supports: https://shd101wyy.github.io/markdown-preview-enhanced/#/diag... . I still use it, separately from Dendron.

3) Storing my data as plain text on disk (backed up by GitHub or Dropbox) has nice properties compared to how SaaS apps do it (e.g. if you use Notion, say, your data materializes out of "the cloud" when you launch the app, and otherwise has no tangible existence). When my data is plain text on my local disk, I own it; I know I can export it, I can run whatever editor or program on it; I can access past versions (via git or Dropbox); I don't have to worry about it being corrupted, or accidentally deleting some of it, or not being able to access it because of server issues, or not being able to export it, or being offline, and so on.

4) The Dendron docs ("wiki") site is created using Dendron. It's a cool thought that I could create a nice website of documentation or notes without leaving VS Code.

Cons:

1) Can't access my notes from mobile.

2) Major warts in navigating between notes. Each note has a tab for editing it and a tab for viewing/previewing it. Opening a note behaves differently depending on which tab is focused. Clicking links to go from one note to another doesn't work very well.

3) Poor full-text search (just VS Code's code search).

4) You can't specify an order for notes, only unordered hierarchy, and you can't easily view multiple notes at once, which means keeping lots of short notes, or using different notes for different sections of a document, doesn't really work. There's a tension in any note-taking tool between short notes and long notes. Should notes be as short as possible? Or stretch into long documents? The ideal tool IMO would blur the difference between an ordered hierarchy of sections within a document and an ordered hierarchy of notes within some grouping. Dendron makes it seem like it is for keeping thousands of small notes, but the ways in which you can view, organize, and navigate between notes (lack of good "browse," search, links, lists, seeing multiple notes, next/previous note, and so on) are so limited that it makes more sense to write long documents. In which case, all you really need is Markdown Preview Enhanced and the file system.

For me, this kind of note taking app ought to use folder names as topics or categories (dev/rust) and have an index.md (dev/rust/index.md) as an entry point, and some sub-documents/sub-sections in the same folder.

Also, many of these tools only go half way: they have folder support but instead of a "bag of posts" you have to put images in a "bag of media" folder, which is even worse sometimes...

Phone actually, specifically. I'd love to be able to just drop in a jrnl entry without faffing with text files on iOS

- 1) Mobile support. We don't have a mobile app but you can access it on mobile using tools like GitJournal or IaWriter. Admitted this is not ideal but we do plan on a native mobile solution later this year. See FAQ here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...

- 2) As for navigating notes, this depends on your style. If your use case includes always having the preview side by side, then navigating with Dendron is not always consistent. If you mainly use the markdown view, navigation is our strong point since you can navigate and create links without leaving the keyboard

- 3) Yes. We don't have full text search but vscode text search is quite good, especially if you combine it with the [search editor](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/692fa114-f798-467f-a0b9-3cccc3...) which lets you create new docs from search results. we also have guides on how to use dendron with elasticsearch [here](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...)

- 4) As for order with notes, there's a few thoughts here. You can embed notes into other notes using [note references](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f1af56bb-db27-47ae-8406-61a98d...) and control the order there. for how it displays in the hiearchy, its alphanumeric sorting. custom sorting is something we can implement if there's enough demand. for lots of short notes, this is where I would push back. VSCode has a fantastic windowing system which lets you split your editor into multiple panes (that can be automatically maximized). I regularly have 5-6 panes open at any given time that are views into different notes, sometimes the same notes. this is actually one of our strongest features since tools like notion only let you view one note at a time

I'm thankful you gave us a chance and do know that we're working on all the points you mentioned!