Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

laverna.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 178 posts

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#61

Post by zmmz »

zachlatta wrote: post #6

I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years. When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment. After trying Evernote, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system for notes. Plain tim…

For those who want a very similar setup but don't mind the risk of a vim-plugin going unmaintained, I can highly recommend vimwiki. Its a very simple markdown based wiki all within vim. A few features that I find particularly good:

- a 'diary' function that allows you to make a page per day. Vimwiki then produces an index page of all diary entries.

- you can go to your wiki anytime from within vim with a command ( ww )

- vimwiki can generate html files from yout wiki files

- the coolest thing in my opinon: since the whole thing is just markdown, I actually just use vimwiki as my personal website hosted on github pages. You just have to add some Jekyll related files and github can process everything else as is.

A small note on obselescence: I actually don't even know if vimwiki is in active development anymore. Haven't bothered updating it in maybe 4 years and it works fine. So maybe its fine to not roll your own.

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#65

Post by amrrs »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #52
zachlatta wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs and plain org-mode may work, but will that be how you want to edit files in the future? It's been a decade and they still haven't figured out mobile.

Orgzly ( http://www.orgzly.com/ ) works well enough for me. It can sync to DropBox, so I can put all my .org files into DropBox for replication/backups and have Orgzly read & update them. It's not full org mode for sure, but it's a solid way to read and do simple changes to my .org files on my phone.

As tools like Evernote and OneNote rose to fame, I've always wondered why do people use such sophisticated note taking apps? People don't seem to be using it for to do list? Maybe because it allows things to be searched? Can someone explain what notes they take or how do they use it?

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#66

Post by edanm »

I'd really love a good Evernote alternative, but the one feature that tends not to exist is full page bookmarking / web clipping. I want to be able to clip a full page easily into the program, which will also save a copy of whatever article I happen to be reading. I really wouldn't mind (and would even love) to roll my own notes system with vim/etc. But without full page clipping, it would be a problem.

Another good thing about Evernote is the easy ability to mix in images, documents, and text.

The reasons I want to leave Evernote, btw, is:

1. I worry about their future and would rather a more open solution.

2. Their software, at least on Mac, really, really sucks. It's slow, and has tons of incredibly ridiculos bugs that have been open for a long time. E.g. when typing in a tag, if there's a dash, it will cause a problem with the autocompletion. For someone who uses the tags a lot and has a whole system based on them, having dashes cause a problem is a big deal, and the fact that it hasn't been fixed in ~ a year makes me really question their priorities.

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#67

Post by someone13 »

ernsheong wrote: post #20

It doesn't do web clippings though. Incidentally, I am building https://pagedash.com to clip web pages more accurately, exactly as you saw it (via a browser extension)! Hope this helps someone.

Your sign up JS is broken - I just tried to enter my email and got a "TypeError: undefined has no properties". Looks like a cool project, though - I've wanted something like that for a while :-)

(oh, and I'm using FF 55 on Linux)

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#68

Post by ziotom78 »

I used to use org-mode to take down notes when I attended seminars or meetings (I'm an astrophysicist). However, a feature I missed was the ability to quickly take photos to insert into my notes, in order to capture slides or calculations/diagrams done on the blackboard.

Thus, last year I subscribed to Evernote (which provides both features), and I must say that I am extremely satisfied. Moreover, Evernote's integration with Firefox and Android allows me to quickly save web pages for later reading (this might be possible with org-mode, but not as handy as with Evernote, which just require one tap.)

I think that Laverna is interesting for users like me: it provides a web app with a nice interface, it implements the first feature I need (easy photo taking), and if really an Android app is on the way, integration with Android services might allow to save web pages is Laverna using one tap like Evernote.

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#69

Post by dyates »

zmmz wrote: post #61
zachlatta wrote: post #6

I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years. When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment. After trying Evernote, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system for notes. Plain tim…

For those who want a very similar setup but don't mind the risk of a vim-plugin going unmaintained, I can highly recommend vimwiki. Its a very simple markdown based wiki all within vim. A few features that I find particularly good: - a 'diary' function that allows you to make a page per day. Vimwiki then produces an index page of all diary entries. - you can go to your wiki anytime from within vim with a command ( ww…

+1 for vimwiki. I use it for everything, from taking notes and todo lists to writing blogposts. The wiki format just works so well with my brain.

My favourite features are nested syntax (highlighting for codeblocks in any language vim has highlighting for)

>since the whole thing is just markdown

I was going to write a complaint about how vimwiki uses its own markup language instead of Markdown, but I looked in the help file to be sure and now I you can set it to use Markdown or even Mediawiki instead (vimwiki-option-syntax). I like it even more now!

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#70

Post by apsdsm »

dman wrote: post #49
zachlatta wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

org-mode's format sucks, is only partially supported outside of Emacs, and is on its way out. org-mode is only any good if you're using the full power of it (tasks, agenda, etc), which is buying into a system that's soon going away.

Can you elaborate what going away means here

"They are inherently readable with cat and the naked eye."
Post reply on HN