91–100 of 425 posts
Real question: what is the use case for viewing notes from 30 years ago? Things that come to mind are evidence in a court of law and having fun looking back on old memories, neither of which seems worth the sometimes incredible amount of trouble.
there are benefits of writing in the text files and still people keep going to these shiny editors/systems. Why? Keeping the excitement of using these things aside, they do make things easier. After using backlinks now, I don't think I can go back. I like how easily I can publish Notion docs. I like how I can use mems[1]-- they have reduced the conginitive load of writing in a sublime doc. So, maybe we should try to…
At my company, we create complex Word documents that are frequently edited. Using a different format (ie, a marked up text file run through Pandoc or LaTex) is far more trouble than its worth.
My personal stuff is in Markdown.
This is one of the main strengths of Obsidian, which I have been using lately and I’m extremely happy with: everything is just Markdown files in some folder on disk. Zero danger of lock in. You can have a disk hierarchy if you desire, or trust that search will find you what you are looking for. For me search works fairly well and if I need something extra I can just grep/sed/awk. Plus it has the features that a simpl…
This is exactly why I switched to Obsidian after trying a few others like Bear, Notion, and Craft. Let me see the files on disk! Don't abstract it away or hide it from me.
On Mac I use Ulysses. I get the benefits described here while still having a fast, native app with excellent UX.
I have Mac for work, and Linux for personal and an Android phone. That means Ulysses on Mac, ThiefMD on Linux, and Markor on Android, all synced with syncthings. Native apps on different OSes is the best solution I've been able to come across.
A single cross platform app would be preferable, but the last time I used Obsidian it was slow, heavy, bloated, with a pretty ugly UI, likely in part due to running on electron.
I use plain text because there is no multimedia equivalent that is universal and end-user controlled, and there are no multimedia equivalents to Vim, Grep, regex, etc. Text is great, but an image, table, or diagram are sometimes irreplaceable. We think we are great innovators, but we are stuck in 1990. Notice also that there are no Vim-equivalents for phones, even though that platform has been widely used for 15+ yea…
Lately I've been working with Inkscape and realized that SVG also has the capacity to be a freeform document tool, and one with a different default context than HTML(scrolling document) or PDF(paginated document). The default setup involves a canvas, it has a notion of object hierarchies that lets you browse content from an outline, it lets you embed assets and layout in a more-or-less arbitrary fashion, it can be coded with JS, and there's some (under-explored) possibility for structured accessibility. It just needs a viewer that approaches the format in a way that makes sense as a target for content creation, beyond its existing role of small vector icons and simple animations.
None of the existing formats have to work exactly right, they just have to be the starting point for a streamlined source; then make a direct viewer for the source and you have the integrated multimedia format.
Another advantage to plain text files: source control. You can check your writing into git and get a history of all your edits. It’s something programmers take for granted, but it would be amazing if this got more widely adopted outside of tech. The number of files with names like “Report Final Final draft v3.docx” is truly staggering. “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.
I've been using iA Writer for all of my text and writing needs for many years, couldn't be happier. https://ia.net/writer
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Markdown is actually awful. There's at least 3 different dialects that are all called Markdown, so if you want your text rendered it's a toss-up as to whether or not it'll look how you intend. I think that Markdown's success is due to a lack of a widely-used, simple alternative that's well-specified. Org is easily and objectively the best markup but of course it's only very very recently that there was a non-emacs im…
Then pick a standardized dialect. Commonmark is the lowest common denominator; GFM is useful for when you need some extra features. Markdown also allows HTML for whenever you need something fancy. The advantage of markdown isn't robustness, it's simplicity. Preteens can get a handle on it in minutes when using Reddit. The main benefit that all these markup-shorthands serve IMO is getting people to add meaning semanti…
Indeed and therein lies what I view is Markdown's worst feature.
I'm a big believer in this, but I use https://bear.app/ . It supports the Markdown format and can export to .md files, but it uses SQLite under the hood, I believe. What's amazing about this is that your thought archive is now searchable (which is fast in bear).
https://fsnot.es - FSNotes is a native (~100% Swift) FOSS app which I believe is modelled after Bear.app. I have been looking at it for sometime now, from a distance. Very active development. Lots of options. But it still doesn’t seem as stable as I would like it to be. Though sometimes it seems kinda all over. For example - it lets you set a storage and then another storage for “git” handling id you’d like to use it…
I have considered switching from Android to iPhone, but I don't know how I'd do notes on it. For work I can't use iCloud. I can only use my company's backup solution. Then for my personal notes I have Android and Linux (desktop), so I can't use iCloud, so I use syncthing or Google Drive. If I went to iOS, I don't know how I'd get my personal notes on Linux syncing with iOS. All the native iOS apps only support iCloud.
Moving from proprietary, WYSIWYG formats (mainly MS Office) to markdown / code as a way of working has been a game changer. Traceability, scalability and productivity is an order of magnitude better.
Anyone have suggestions for a solution?