Show HN: Bike – macOS Native Outliner

Why would I buy this over Obsidian or Logseq, both of which are free and support more platforms?

Are there any limits to the unlicensed mode? Is it a shareware or more in line with Sublime Text style?

I think you could encode a “shelf” last-write-wins CRDT into your HTML using data attributes without exploding your file size. You would need to add a data-version attribute, and if you want to support hand-editing or editing by programs that don’t understand the CRDT, a CRC32 or other parity as data-parity so your loader can tell when a user might have edited a row without updating data-version.

Shelf is really simple - the JS implementation is tiny (https://github.com/dglittle/shelf) and a walkthrough of the algorithm here is a quick read: https://bartoszsypytkowski.com/shelf-crdt/amp/

It wouldn’t handle character level sync - but would let you merge documents at a rows/items/blocks level.

They both provide many great features, but Bike provides some unique features too. I think they are pretty well listed on Bike's home page (features), but I'll add some notes here:

1. "Fluid" (smoothly animated) editing. You could argue it's not important, but this is something new and unique to Bike. Bike is a "tool for thought". I think how the app feels is an important aspect.

2. macOS native app, of course this is a plus and minus. But if you are on a Mac Bike will generally us a lot less resources then those apps and integrate better with the rest of the system.

3. Local files in open formats. Logseq has this of Course, but I think there's something pretty nice about having your outline just be simple HTML. Easy to parse, easy to work with, should be able to view and make sense of as long as web's around.

4. Faster. Bike is designed to work on somewhat big outlines. Moby Dick has been my test file. It opens instantly. I've just pasted that into Logseq and my computer is working hard a few minutes later. Not sure how workflowy does because it puts me over quotas.

Bike has a pretty unique foundation compared to other outliner apps. It's also missing a lot of higher level features that I plan to build out over time.

There are some editor preferences that need a license and AppleScript support requires a license. Going forward I expect most new features will also require a license. For example I hope to add rich text support next and that will require a license. (same license will unlock all new features)