The best self hosted alternative of Notion I have found is Outline[1]
The link describing the infra[2] is an example of how it looks.
[1] github.com/outline/outline [2] https://docs.getoutline.com/s/hosting/doc/requirements-ULdYn...
Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
71–80 of 140 posts
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#72At the risk of sabotaging stuff I've worked on, it's _astoundingly easy_ to glue together Y.js, prosemirror, and a little bit of express.js to get a distributed Notion clone with conflict free resolution. Like I have something that I got working in 3 days with multiple pages, so links between things, and cursor syncing (most of this work is provided by wonderful people with full-featured libraries!). There's some tri…
fyi, from my experience it’s still quite a lot of work to build on top of Prosemirror and TipTap directly to do so. So I’ve started working on https://www.blocknotejs.org to make this even easier for developers; its a batteries-included library with Notion style UI elements out of the box. Definitely bullish on this ecosystem including Yjs and local first dev!
YousefED, love Blocknote, but I ended up not using it for a new project, just because it's too prescriptive. Which I totally get is a positive for many. I.e they want the UI and controls built in and off the shelf. I would love to just use the Core API (block etc) and get some useful hooks, so I can extend it in my own ways
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
fyi, from my experience it’s still quite a lot of work to build on top of Prosemirror and TipTap directly to do so. So I’ve started working on https://www.blocknotejs.org to make this even easier for developers; its a batteries-included library with Notion style UI elements out of the box. Definitely bullish on this ecosystem including Yjs and local first dev!
I built on the same stack and have a similar opinion. It’s only easy if you’re depending on the webrtc implementation. If you’re coordinating changes across your own server, you gotta put in some work.
I did not rely on the webrtc implementation. Really you gotta do a lot of "echo server"-style shraing of messages and some sync messages from time to time but Yjs/CRDT stuff works pretty smoothly on this front.
But my requirements are pretty loose
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#74> Novel is not just your average WYSIWYG editor; it takes things to a whole new level with its AI-powered autocompletions. With the seamless integration of Tiptap, OpenAI, and the Vercel AI SDK, it can fuck up your prose in ways you never thought possible. Imagine effortlessly composing sentences that flow with elegance and precision, as if written by a seasoned wordsmith. Novel's AI-powered autocompletions analyze your writing style, context, and even the tone you want to convey if you're a complete idiot. Novel's autocompletions are designed to enhance your writing experience by seamlessly integrating AI technology. Whether you're a professional writer or a beginner, Novel's intuitive interface and powerful features make it easy to compose engaging and polished content. With the combined bullshittery of AI and your own incompetence, you can now create literary disasters that will leave readers scratching their heads in confusion. But hey, at least it's all in the name of innovation, right?
The italics are mine. Pretty good.
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#75For a text editor like this a base LLM would be more appropriate, one that does just autocomplete, without being instruction tuned. Unfortunately these base models are either unavailable (GPT-4), outdated (GPT-3/davinci) or otherwise restricted (GPT-3.5 aka code-davinci-002 is only available via Microsoft Azure and more expensive than the instruction tuned GPT-3.5-turbo model).
divinci-003 is outdated? I actually switched back to it after trying gpt4 for a while because I thought it was too assistant-y. I have a switch to use gpt4 when I feel like I need it to be smarter but I rarely reach for it.
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#76At the risk of sabotaging stuff I've worked on, it's _astoundingly easy_ to glue together Y.js, prosemirror, and a little bit of express.js to get a distributed Notion clone with conflict free resolution. Like I have something that I got working in 3 days with multiple pages, so links between things, and cursor syncing (most of this work is provided by wonderful people with full-featured libraries!). There's some tri…
Any notion replacement needs to be offline first and mobile first.
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#77> Novel is not just your average WYSIWYG editor; it takes things to a whole new level with its AI-powered autocompletions. With the seamless integration of Tiptap, OpenAI, and the Vercel AI SDK, it can fuck up your prose in ways you never thought possible. Imagine effortlessly composing sentences that flow with elegance and precision, as if written by a seasoned wordsmith. Novel's AI-powered autocompletions analyze y…
Ha, I love your parts! Now the tricky part is to get the AI to be as witty as you… :P
Thanks for playing around with Novel!
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#78Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#79Tangent: On the note of web based text field for "normal users", what's the best UX you can get while also trying to be as no-JS-friendly as possible? Are there CSS-only tricks to make editing in an input field nice? I'm making a low-JS site, but it also has a lot of input fields, user content generation, etc. In "modern CSS" i feel like Input boxes should be better than they are. Is JS the only way?
“Normal users” have JS enabled and don’t care how much JS you send them. They don’t even know what it is.
I feel like if you’re targeting a no-JS crowd, that’s a very specific crowd, i.e. this one.
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor
#80Tangent: On the note of web based text field for "normal users", what's the best UX you can get while also trying to be as no-JS-friendly as possible? Are there CSS-only tricks to make editing in an input field nice? I'm making a low-JS site, but it also has a lot of input fields, user content generation, etc. In "modern CSS" i feel like Input boxes should be better than they are. Is JS the only way?
Rich text editing is probably not possible or not worth it. However, most people who disable JS are probably fine with not using rich text and definitely shouldn’t expect it. Just add a CSS stylesheet which turns into something half-decent, put a note that markdown is supported, and make a plain text editor.
> Just add a CSS stylesheet which turns into something half-decent, put a note that markdown is supported, and make a plain text editor.
If you're not going with prosemirror or similar off-the-shelf component, then this is the only way to not annoy your users. Augment it with a side-b-y-side RO view of the rendered markdown.
I mean, even the linked page is a confusing UI: you enter `**` for a bold sentence, and then when you arrow-left to the beginning of the sentence you cannot delete just the `*` you typed in.[1]
[1] I feel a better way to do this would be to not allow markdown to actually be typed in, so that the user never sees it. This sidesteps the confusion when trying to remove just the markdown. Let the user use shortcut keys and/or buttons on selections, because to remove a formatting rule they simply repeat what they did to create that rule.