I wish Obsidian supported mobile devices, Github based versioning and cross-device synchronization.That would be the perfect note taking app for me. Is there such alternative? I want the graph view too.
Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
61–70 of 172 posts
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#62It only works for VSCode? This is so frustrating because this is exactly the kind of system I've been looking for.
It's on VSCode because it was the quickest way for me to prove build out. We do have plans for standalone editors in 2021 (https://dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b55...)
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#63I wish Obsidian supported mobile devices, Github based versioning and cross-device synchronization.That would be the perfect note taking app for me. Is there such alternative? I want the graph view too.
I use GitHub with my Obsidian vault for versioning and cross-device synchronization. I wish there was a mobile app as well, but GitJournal has been sufficient so far.
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#64On the website you mention using it in conjunction with other note taking tools. How do you envision using Dendron in conjunction with another note taking tool like Roam?
Dendron has a notion of pods - plugins you can use to import, export, publish and (soon to come) sync data between different tools of thought. These plugins can be written and share using nodejs and are meant to provide interoperability between dendron and other tools
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#65Wow! Another knowledge base tool :). I'm working on https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy and am especially excited about the new plugin system [0] that'll be ready soon.
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#66Hacker 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 so…
I employ a simple version of the bullet journaling method. I maintain an index at the beginning of the book where I add topics and the page numbers that I have information about it on. Still not ctrl-f speed of course, but I am not flipping through my notebook trying to find the right page. For your situation, I'll probably right down the job reference on the page of the day, and then add a `Job References` entry in the index and add the current page number beside it. At the end of each year, I'll digitize everything important for archival purposes (usually very little), and move over ongoing collections (like book list), to the next notebook.
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#67I 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…
> I 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?)
This is not a "Roam-like tool" by that description. Notes are basically markdown. A bullet might contain a link to a different note, or you could link to several in a bullet or paragraph, or you could link to none, but using bullets doesn't implicitly create nested notes any more than it normally creates separate nested documents in Markdown.
The additional logic seems more built around the directory structure than bullets.
> 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.
I haven't used Dendron, just barely installed it and poked around, but it seems like the combination of markdown documents and a heirarchical organization alongside a link graph makes it more straightforward to maintain large bodies of maintained/synthesized content rather than small bits of linked content that are easy to navigate but hard to pull together (which tools that focus on linking between small documents as the main structure do seem to encourage.)
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#68Having a graph-based interface for the relationships is nice. But i think this works best with big monitor (think 43'') and when the graph is the main interface, not just a small window somewhere. I.e. display the content of nodes directly in an infinite-pan&zoom graph view. Code reading could be nice this way. I suppose mentally one builds up a similar graph everytime reading through code. And eventually get lost. O…
I'm planning to create a (probably written in Vulkan, so it will be ambitious...) project where I want to leverage modern 3D graphics for displaying potentially very large graphs in an intuitive & interactive way. I'm trying to target use cases such as note taking and mind-mapping as well as code browsing and git repo browsing as I see many potential ways to create visualization capability (via unification) across the multiple abstraction layers (many of which involve graph structures). E.g., git tree is a DAG, and the nodes on there are source file trees themselves. We could view a list of GitHub PRs on a repo as a list of nodes which point into locations within the repo's git tree. It's turtles all the way down, since source files can themselves be decomposed into ASTs, and those yet further into syntactical trees.
I imagine that with common workflows (one of which I just proposed) without the barrier of context switching could be a big win. At a certain zoom level I'm envisioning being able to directly see which portions of source are touched by the different PRs for example.
Another example of this is in applying this toward file browsing and the management of backups (i'll want to sprinkle tree differencing visualization in there).
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#69I'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?
Another one https://www.kialo.com/tour
Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
#70I have tried a number of note taking apps including Bear and Notable; I recently switched to MS OneNote because it's cross-platform from OSX to PC, making it easier for me to consolidate all my notes in once desktop app.
It's likely an unpopular choice given it's from 'Big-Co, Inc', etc, but it's hard to beat. My favorite feature that sold me is the ability to tab and instantly create an inline table (with each subsequent tab pressing creating additional columns). It's quite powerful and flexible. You can also add multiple text blocks to a note page allow for extra context to be placed anywhere. This isn't limited to just text, but adding a graphic to an existing text block, again anywhere on the note 'space'
Honestly, it's really quite an impressive note app and I've moved completely off of Bear in favor of it. The syncing is also free, which was something I was paying a yearly sub to Bear for. The cherry on-top is the also free iOS app which works really well too.
That said, I do think there is room for something like Dendron, which is pretty slick and I quite like that it's a VS-Code add-on. I'll def give it a serious look, nice job!