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

wiki.dendron.so

21–30 of 89 posts

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

#21
I built a similar tool but as a new-tab extension, basically dumps all my notes into Sqlite, simple PHP script for "sync". Just recently got the web-share-targrt on Android working so I can drop Trello.

And I built the silly "discovery" feature where it randomly pushes an old one to the top to help keep it clean.

Also, Sqlite text search FTS5 is rad

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

#22
post #9

Thanks for sharing it. Here is another similar product: A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode https://github.com/foambubble/foam

I'm very interested in a compare between the two!! I'd known of Foam & was planning to at around with it's forming new extension api[1]. I like that foam stores history in git, & can write static html output, which the project uses to self-document. It'd be sweet to hear from folks who've tried both how they found the experience. I'll try to become one of those folks myself, at some point. [1] https://jevakallio.gith…

Dendron is similar to foam. We support all the features of foam but put the emphasis on structuring and organizing your notes.

Dendron helps you organize your notes into hierarchies that you can enforce using schemas (think type system but for your hierarchies)

The problem we're solving: once you have hundreds or thousands of notes, how do you find a specific one?

More on this here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...

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

#23
post #4

This looks really cool! I'm going to give it a try. I always lose my notes. My workaround is a personal Discord server, to post notes to myself, which is nice to have a mobile app where I can share links to on mobile I want to save for later, but the different channels doesn't really provide enough structure to the notes, plus searching is not great in discord. Do you have like a hack to post notes to and from mobile…

For mobile, a lot of our users use gitjournal or an equivalent app. Since your notes are backed by git, anything that supports git will work.

Also looking into building a draft like mobile app later this year to support your use case of quickly adding to existing nots.

See mobile use cases here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...

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

#24

Why? Isn't Obsidian better?

See here on the differences between Dendron and Obsidian https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...

tldr: obsidian is easier to get started with and is good for free association of notes. dendron is better integrated into the development workflow and is amazing at helping you organize your notes into well defined hierarchies

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

#25
post #3

Thank you. I tried hopping onto the Zettelkasten/self-markdown-wiki bandwagon with Obsidian but its non-commercial clause was really discouraging... so I said "F it" and returned to OneNote (which BTW does have pretty permissive links!).

I was a long one note user. I think they have great UX. I found it difficult to export from one note or drill down to something specific quickly. If it helps, we do have a bunch of former one note users as well as scripts to convert from one note to markdown

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

#26
My biggest gripe with note taking apps is that basically all of the ones I've seen take the IDE approach. They are not as much note taking apps as specialized document editors. Because of this I'm still stuck with Tomboy which is very far from ideal but at least it's quick and easy to start typing a new note . (Unfortunately it doesn't support markdown, only starting bullet points with typing a *, it does support wiki links, which I don't use much but it uses some xml format.)

Most notes, at least the way I work, start as just that: notes. Then some of them grow more complex and evolve into a larger document (or ideally, could evolve into multiple linked ones), but Tomboy doesn't really support it (at least if it had support for copy-ing away text as markdown...) and I really don't feel like having yet another IDE like app taking up the whole screen for every small note.

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

#27

How are people using tools like this and Roam, Obesdian, etc. etc. etc? Personally I could see the use if you were writing a book or something, but I feel like in practice for normal notes I would just have all of these notes that I'd never look at again or spend so much time traversing my notes and not getting things done. As someone with distractive tendencies I'd love to hear the situations where this is useful so…

A big part of my note-taking is just to get stuff out of my brain. I might never revisit any of it, and that's fine. If I write it down I know I can always go back when I need to, but if I don't , it's going to be an annoying distraction in my subconscious. A lot of my note-taking therefore becomes an excuse to successfully ignore the things I know I don't need to pay attention to. I do have a bunch of notes that I u…

That first paragraph is exactly my experience, too. When I read "Getting Things Done", the lightning bolt that struck me was learning that simply getting stuff out of my head and into a trusted system is enough to let me stop obsessing about it and concentrate on other things.

Last week I had one of those dreaming-about-writing-code sort of nights, where I half woke up and was thinking about the stuff I'd been dreaming about and couldn't go back to sleep. I tossed and turned until I grabbed my phone, opened my notes app, jotted down some of the idea, then closed it. That alone let my mind say "ok, now I won't forget it" and I was finally able to go back to sleep.

Some people go full-on Zettelkasten, which is awesome and I'm happy for them. Turns out I really don't need all the organization. I just need somewhere to offload my thoughts where I know I can find them later, and just the process of writing them down usually gets me 99% of the benefit of having such a system.

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

#28

We have so many roam-alikes but so very few with web publishing as a first-class citizen and the ones that do have it paywalled (Roam, Obsidian) or don't support org-mode (Neuron v2 though there's plans to reintroduce), which just blows Markdown out of the water.

You should try logseq[1], been using it for quite some time now and it's coming really well. It is an Open source local-first roam alternative, it supports both markdown and org syntax and it has a lot of features like publishing, encryption, time tracking etc.

[1] https://logseq.com/

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