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Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

dendron.so

151–160 of 172 posts

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#151
post #112

I was curious what was different about this than Roam/Obsidian/ect. and checked the FAQ: > Dendron is a highly opinionated note taking tool that focuses on hierarchal note taking. It provides the freedom of Roam’s every note exists everywhere philosophy while layering on top flexible hierarchies to keep track of it all. [0] Not sure how I feel about that approach. However, it does look pretty polished and I'll likely…

It seems that the core features of Dendron correspond most closely to Obsidian's, to the point that I thought it's an Obsidian skin, but Obsidian is closed source while Dendron isn't. Roam is a Web app whose unit of data is a text block - Obsidian's and Dendron's unit of data is a file Markdown file.

Agreed. I've personally never used Roam, as I definitely need my files to be in some form of plain text.

Obsidian is cool in my eyes because I can start it up and click around if I want (more of review tool and looking at a cool graph), but in general I just create/edit my files in Vim. That's why I'm unsure about the opinionated hierarchy deal of Dendron. It just seems like another layer to deal with - although not much of a stretch to see a value add with it. Right now, I don't have enough files to be overwhelmed with my ad-hoc structure to spend the time trying it.

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#152

It's frustrating but completely understandable that the author chose to do this in VScode. The value of having a highly-customizable editor that is extensible in a well-known language is great. I really hope a true VSCode competitor will emerge in the future that is truly open source and not controlled by a company that does not have its users best interests in mind; all this Linux-friendly stuff Microsoft is doing l…

Maybe you should give VSCodium[1] a try? [1] https://github.com/VSCodium/

Dendron is also available on VSCodium :)

https://dendron.so/notes/9134f160-31a6-4ab0-a640-1fce466f952...

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#153
post #70

I 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 subse…

Thanks :)

Let me know if you have any feedback or questions after you start using it.

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#154
post #30

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?), 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…

Dendron encourages you to put all your content into one note and then gives you tooling to slice it into hierarchies once that note is too big. See https://dendron.so/notes/e780000d-c784-4945-8e42-35218a3ecf1...

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#155
post #7

Just quickly watched this[1] video showing an intro to Dendron. I'm currently using tiddlywiki[2] so that's primarily what I'm comparing it too. Both tiddlywiki and dendron look very similar, supporting various forms of linking to one another. Dendron seems to have a more complete hierarchical way of combining pages, at least compared to the way that I use tiddlywiki. Tiddlywiki's advantage is the amount of plugins i…

You're right, Dendron doesn't easily integrate with web clients yet. Files are plaintext markdown and most of our users are using dropbox/nextcloud setup.

That being said, Dendron lets you publish your notes as static sites (eg. https://dendron.so is just published using notes) and we'll be expanding this feature to do private hosting of notes with limited editing capabilities later in December

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#156

Enjoying Obsidian at the moment, will keep an eye on this one too, but honestly can't justify the switch away (note-taking is such a habit-based, "flow" tool) unless there's a _significant_ advantage to Dendron. I guess everyone values something different. I am happy to pay for these tools, and even have them closed-source, as long as (1) it can run locally, "offline", and (2) the format is open (index-able text, whe…

at the end of the day, if you have a note taking tool that you like and are using, then my advice is to stick with it. that being said, we'll be launching an obsidian importer next week to make it easy for folks to experiment with dendron if the temptation strikes :)

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#157

The 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 i…

> 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. XML is a data-format, not an enduser-format. It's used everywhere, what is there more to hear about it? > All word processors should be hierarchical rather than monolithic (linear) No, they should not, it's just a pain. Word processors have hierarchical view, but enforcing…

Documents are almost always hierarchical, but yes for reading purposes, something like an "expand all" is helpful for presenting it all in a single view, so you just need to hit down arrow key if you want to perhaps read it from beginning to end with minimal user gestures. So the GUI interaction is a separate issue from the storage format and representation.

The way Quanta works is that every sentence or paragraph can have an entire conversation thread underneath it, which is light-years ahead of the "Revision Marks" feature of MS Office/365 for example. The model Quanta is using for team collaboration on documents means for example you can post a big long question about a single sentence in a doc, and it doesn't get in the way of the main doc, or become visible unless expanded.

They way Quanta works is definitely the future, even if it's some other platform other than Quanta where this takes off.

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean that you have a tag-cloud in Org? Is there a package for that?

Uploaded a cut-down version of my diary.org file here: https://github.com/skx/org-worklog That shows the tag-cloud and the necessary magic to update it on-save.

I cannot get it to work with M-x new-day, is there something other I need to do than have the document open? Thanks for sharing btw.

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uploaded a cut-down version of my diary.org file here: https://github.com/skx/org-worklog That shows the tag-cloud and the necessary magic to update it on-save.

I cannot get it to work with M-x new-day, is there something other I need to do than have the document open? Thanks for sharing btw.

I saw now that I have to evaluate two lines of code, how do I set up my dot-files so that this happens? I am kinda lost.

Re: Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

#160
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be better to just not give these crazies any more publicity?

Evidently OP is eager to promote the people on that list and believes they are serious thinkers

change "believes" to "knows" and yes.
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