A structured note-taking app for personal use • Hacker News Board

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#111

Post by rubslopes » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

Roark66 wrote: post #41

vunderba wrote: post #21

Nice going. I've gone through quite the list of note taking tools from a bunch of unorganized text files, to Microsoft OneNote, to Evernote before it became a total pile of molten garbage, Logseq, and finally settled on Obsidian. There's a healthy ecosystem of plug-ins, searching is highly performant, all of my files are just structured in folders as markdown files so there's zero vendor lock-in, has a very good mobi…

>Evernote I _still_ have some notes in Evernote. Imagine my surprise when I logged in after maybe a year of not using it and now search in text notes is not working unless "you upgrade". WTF? The only good feature of everyone now is that it's easy to export ones notes (I hope that still works). (about Obsidian) >The only downside is that it's not open source Indeed, but a saving grace is that it can just store in a b…

It got worse: 3 weeks ago Evernote announced that their free version will be limited to 50 notes

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981683/evernote-limit-...

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#112

Post by CrypticShift » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:08 PM UTC

swah wrote: post #105

CrypticShift wrote: post #99

This is what I call an outliner-database hybrid. FYI, many note-taking apps are going in this direction. - Tana.inc (closed alpha) introduced the concept of supertags [1], equivalent to what this app calls meta tags - Remnote.com also added editable tables [2] to its outlines not long ago (only in the paid version). - Logseq.com is planning such an addition soon. It is a powerful combo because it combines two very pr…

Capacities too. But I feel like Notion is easier to maintain in the end and has the databases with linked records and you can do lots of stuff with that... not sure why Notion gets so much hate.

Yeah, they both have DBs, and you can kind of outline inside pages. The difference is that, technically, in a "real outliner", each "node" (or line) is (by default) a different entry in the database, whereas in page-based apps (Capacities/Notion), it is the whole page.

Capacities is partially going in this direction. Notion, less so, but it is simple and advanced (linked records...) and hence a favorite of mine too.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#113

Post by poulpy123 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

remram wrote: post #85

poulpy123 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found syncthing lost severals of my changes . I settled on the live sync plugin and for the moment it works nicely

Thanks for the pointer! https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync : self-hostable sync via CouchDB, MIT license, supports the visual conflict resolver and end-to-end encryption.

I'm using a free hosting by IBM, the set up is decribed in the plug in github, so it was easy

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#114

Post by poulpy123 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

Brajeshwar wrote: post #47

poulpy123 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found syncthing lost severals of my changes . I settled on the live sync plugin and for the moment it works nicely

How did Syncthing lost your changes? Are you talking about versions or the sync? I'm gradually transitioning to Syncthing for a lot of stuffs and I want to be prepared.

I lost changes that I made on one device. To be fair it was probably a mistake on my side, but I didn't notice how it happened so I prefered look elsewhere for a sync solution for obsidian.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#115

Post by rubslopes » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

PurpleRamen wrote: post #100

Ringz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won a lot and didn't lose anything. Obsidian plus a few plugins beats Joplin on every level. And I can edit all notes without redundancy by exporting from a Joplin database with nvim, iA Writer, find, grep, cat and millions of other tools.

> Obsidian plus a few plugins beats Joplin on every level. Not really. Obsidian has its shares of problems too, and most of them originate from using Markdown. Markdown is a freeform text-format, and works very well for writing text, but it really sucks for data and structured content. Most plugins and features in that area are very brittle and overspecialized, working only well enough in their specific use case. And…

> And gosh, Obsidian has really a huge amount of plugins for data-handling. At some point, it was so bad that there were multiple competing task-plugins which broke each other just because they had different formatting for dates.

Depends on how you see it. I think it's great that they have a free market of open-sourced plug-ins that you can donate to. I'm actually impressed of how rarely they break each other.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#116

Post by sciurus » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #37

szszrk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you disliked about Logseq? Are you good at self-organizing (were you before)? While the initial experience is super confusing and I barely knew what that tool is supposed to do, later on it turned out to be the first tool that helped me keep some structure in my notes. I love note taking but I'm horrible at it, chaotic and inconsistent. Daily notes plus the way logseq easily links articles gave me some decent no…

Logseq is "Everything plus the kitchen sink" when compared to Obsidian out of the box. For me, I already have a daily planning and project management tool, and it's called Pagico. What I needed is a note taking application. Simple, down to earth, knowledge base. A successor to Zim wiki, I may say. That thing is Obsidian. I tried to resist to moving it for so long because it's closed source, but it creates value and e…

> In short, Logseq feels too big, feels too hard to start with, and demands too much at the first impression. If failed to get me, and I failed to get it.

This is interesting, because it wasn't my experience at all. I migrated from Roam to Logseq after I realized I didn't use enough of the fancier features to justify the price. Basically I open Logseq, take notes in my daily journal, and tag blocks so that I can easily pull them up by topic/person/etc later. That's all it took for me to get started, and also as far as I've felt the need to go. For better or worse I have no idea what other "kitchen sink" features it has.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#117

Post by jmhammond » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:30 PM UTC

jddj wrote: post #54

Vingdoloras wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Obsidian's text editing experience compare to VSCode? I'm using VSC for everything at the moment, which includes a workspace roughly structured into GTD categories via subfolders, filled with markdown documents. The only thing that keeps me curious about Obsidian is the note linking/network visualization and features related to that. But I'm so used to having dev tool levels of text editing available in VSC…

Same here, but other side of the chasm. I use logseq for note keeping but I just want the text editing experience of vs code. I'm not sure why they all roll their own editor. Can't it be a plugin?

In Logseq, you can open the current note in the default system editor - I do this for long form note taking (in my case in emacs) but everything is back in the Logseq graph for connection and search and all its syncing goodies.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#118

Post by bradley13 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:40 PM UTC

I look at these apps occasionally, and I've even tried a few of them. In the end, I find them to just be overkill. Give me a simple text editor, and I put the text files where the information belongs.

Using fancy apps, where you can do formatting, place links, etc? I spend too much time futzing with all that stuff and less time actually getting stuff done.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#119

Post by bayindirh » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:49 PM UTC

kirso wrote: post #98

utybo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logseq is great, but I definitely agree that everything around it (docs, website, ...) is terrible. They really need to rework their marketing pitch and give proper docs. Right now you have docs scattered across 3 websites, and the only useful one is made in Logseq itself, which isn't a good system for scaling documentation.

The sad part is that the tool is really underrated. You don't need to even think where to put notes. All that overwhelm that all the folks are speaking about, just start writing in your daily page, when you look back -> you have a clear link. It actually kills ambiguity without having folders and having too much un-needed structure (obviously use-case varies). Logseq doesn't need plugins because a lot of it is alread…

I think an application's usefulness depends on how much you align with its design and mindset it brings to the table.

For some people, stuffing pages into a notebook (a-la Evernote/Joplin) is fine. I use Evernote, and it's fine for most things.

However when things start to get crowded, this model breaks down. I also don't like shoving things into an application and meta-sort it with tags and whatnot. I like structured work, because I can put clutter aside in the structure and focus on what I'm working on.

Also, having the files as plain Markdown files is a plus for me, even if it doesn't have the block references. As I already said, I need Obsidian for document and knowhow management, and glorified text files are what I exactly want.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#120

Post by Aicy » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:54 PM UTC

bradley13 wrote: post #118

I look at these apps occasionally, and I've even tried a few of them. In the end, I find them to just be overkill. Give me a simple text editor, and I put the text files where the information belongs. Using fancy apps, where you can do formatting, place links, etc? I spend too much time futzing with all that stuff and less time actually getting stuff done.

I spent lots of time with notion and obsidian and this is what I came to as well.

What I do now is have markdown files, and use the OS folder system for organising. I then use OneDrive for syncing - this works perfectly fine between MacOS and Windows, and for both I use Visual Studio Code for editing. For android I use an app called FolderSync to sync and TMarkor for editing.

Has been working perfectly for over a year now.