How is Dendron different from Foam[1]? At first glance, both projects are very similar.
I would be also interested in a more detailed comparison. Specially with foam and obsidian
Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
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Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#22Hacker News loves their note taking apps. I've seen at least a dozen apps this year that have solved the exact same problem in just about the exact same ways. Am I the only one that still uses pen and paper? To me, there's a certain je ne sais quoi about closing my laptop and putting my phone away , grabbing a pen and my notebook, and brainstorming without technology.
I use good old windows notepad and save them on my desktop. I tried almost anything, rocketbook, asana, one note, pen and paper. Simplest one was notepad and always worked for me.
Yep, visually ̶s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶y undistracting, lightning fast, available everywhere and dead simple. Want hierarchy? Make folders. Want to cut across the hierarchy? Make links. Want to search? Use a search tool. (You can even use grep now in a WSL session.)
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#23Unsure about the tool being a vscode plugin. I like my current note taking app (ZimWiki) partly due to it being standalone.
I wish ZimWiki would be Markdown based instead of Wiki markup based.
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#24This is really interesting for me. I've just got into roam the last few months after an intertest in trying zettelkasten (and my notion growing rather unwieldly), but the $15/m is grinding at me. The idea I'll be locked in at that price forever more doesn't sit well For me org-roam doesn't scratch the portability itch (easily add notes on my phone etc), but I'm actively looking for alternatives I can make the jump fo…
I went through a similar tool search (i.e. zettelkasten, roam, notable.md, dendron, etc). With the same notions of dendron operating only in VSCode. Long story, it didn't fit well for me. While dendron operated and was structured well, VSCode was just too slow to launch and not widely available enough for my use case. May be important to note though that I don't 'live' in VSCode like many others do. I settled on other applications which allow me to directly interact with the files inside and outside the application.
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#25Hacker News loves their note taking apps. I've seen at least a dozen apps this year that have solved the exact same problem in just about the exact same ways. Am I the only one that still uses pen and paper? To me, there's a certain je ne sais quoi about closing my laptop and putting my phone away , grabbing a pen and my notebook, and brainstorming without technology.
I do that too.
And afterwards I scan the page for archival.
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#26Hacker News loves their note taking apps. I've seen at least a dozen apps this year that have solved the exact same problem in just about the exact same ways. Am I the only one that still uses pen and paper? To me, there's a certain je ne sais quoi about closing my laptop and putting my phone away , grabbing a pen and my notebook, and brainstorming without technology.
I do most note-taking on paper. Problem with paper is that it's not searchable, as I discovered to my cost trying to find some specific reference details for a job I did last year and am repeating today. My problems are probably more due to ad hoc disorganisation - particularly, sometimes going off-piste and making critical notes on random sheets of paper, away from my main notebooks.
I'd love some kind of e-paper solution, in a notebook form, but I've no idea how it could gracefully and capably mimic the act of turning pages and having a chrono-spacial awareness of where the content in each of those pages lie.
In some far future we'll have paper-thin writeable electronic displays and can literally make a notebook to rule them all, but it'll be a while. And even then, likely very expensive.
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#27I've always wanted a better way to document and structure arguments/debates. Assertions can have supporting statements (as children), that can be further expanded and evaluated. This way, I can evaluate and discard branches, distilling an argument to what matters. Would a tool like this help me?
Like this? https://www.rationaleonline.com/
There's also https://argdown.org/ -- A simple syntax for complex argumentation
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#28The web platform I've created (https://quanta.wiki) has a lot of these same design principles, and I run a local copy of it for my personal note-taking.
Some day there should emerge some kind of de-facto winner in this category, because it's so sad that it's 2020 and there's still not a super wide-spread mass-adoption kind of general purpose app for handling hierarchical data and interacting with it.
When XML was invented I was sure it would change the world (and arguably, enabling RSS/Atom did), but now in 2020 you don't hear much about XML.
All word processors should be hierarchical rather than monolithic (linear), imo, and Quanta endeavors to show one way to do that in a wiki-like app.
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#29Here's an interesting alternative for hierarchical notes:
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#30I haven't yet really tried to commit to one of these Roam-like tools (is there a word for a note-taking tool where every bullet is a nested note, and they can link to each other?), except for a small demo notebook I made, but I wonder how people feel they mesh with the concept of "evergreen" notes.
I've found from using Evernote for a decade that I've really focussed on making evergreen notes -- notes that I continue adding to over time. I worry that the Roam-like notebooks instead lead you to making a "Personal Wikipedia" of your knowledge, where many notes are just the stub of an article, because it's so easy to do.
I worry that, if I used this, instead of a 2-3 big pages on Topic X, I'd have 50 little notes on Topic X, which, yes, I can find through backlinks, but I would not have felt like I had synthesized.
Thoughts?