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

Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

wiki.dendron.so

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 89 posts

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#71

Post by kstrauser »

epiecs wrote: post #63
kstrauser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That first paragraph is exactly my experience, too. When I read "Getting Things Done", the lightning bolt that struck me was learning that simply getting stuff out of my head and into a trusted system is enough to let me stop obsessing about it and concentrate on other things. Last week I had one of those dreaming-about-writing-code sort of nights, where I half woke up and was thinking about the stuff I'd been dreami…

Same here. The combo that seems to work for me is onenote combined with zotero. - Onenote for ideas and scribbles - zotero for bookmarks and documents. Supports tags - physical notebook for note taking during meetings btw you can easily connect zotero to your own nas via webdav and you have unlimited storage. Works fine for me. The only drawback of zotero is that you dont have a native mobile client.

I love Drafts for the Mac ecosystem. It has two giant things going for it:

- It opens instantly to a blank window ready for me to type into.

- It's extensible with built-in actions and JavaScript so that I can automate things like posting the text I just wrote to Twitter or Mastodon, or add it to OmniFocus, or text it to my wife, etc. etc. etc.

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#72

Post by hobo_mark »

I have not seen it mentioned here a lot, but Joplin (another open-source, local-first, markdown-based, note-taking tool) also has a vscode extension (to search and edit notes in code), in addition to desktop and mobile apps. Joplin is much simpler however (no linking between notes for example), depending on what you do that may be an advantage.

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#73

Post by kevinslin »

jvanderbot wrote: post #69
dgreensp wrote: post #51

I tried out Dendron a few months ago for personal note-taking, technical docs, and organizing tasks. I was excited at first, but overall the cons outweighed the pros for me. Pros/exciting things: 1) There's a simplicity in using VS Code for writing notes and docs if (and probably only if) you already spend your day in VS Code, like I do. 2) The Markdown Preview Enhanced VS Code extension (which is a dependency of Den…

You might enjoy plain text logging on top of git or Dropbox. Keep your markdown notes in one location, backed by git. Pull on any device for any reason. Use GitHub's / Dropbox's web interface when required. - Search with grep - Structured text + grep is extremely powerful - use vim / emacs customization for display - Display anything using, say dot or graphviz - Edit with VSCode if you like vscode . Anything else oth…

Yeah, those are some of the core features that I can't live without. A lot of the reason for building in VSCode is because they have a good VIM extension :)

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#74

Post by kevinslin »

bachmeier wrote: post #65

One thing that's kind of important to me is that Dendron does not (as far as I can tell) have much in the way of outliner functionality. Other tools in this space do - for instance, org-mode for Emacs users. That would be a nice addition, given how powerful outlines can be.

Yeah, we don't do outline in the workflowy sense. we do outlines in the sense that we have shortcuts to create notes from bullets and autolink the new note. not the same but gets close. you can see an example here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/593206ea-5658-4874-bafd-18a138...

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#75

Post by kevinslin »

mcbishop wrote: post #68

I found Dendron via HN a few months ago and absolutely love it. I was hemming and hawing with my Dendron file structure until I found the PARA method (in a Dendron tutorial): https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/ . I love that the dots in Dendron file names (e.g. resource.orgs.pacific-energy-center) lets me avoid the awkwardness of folders while still having hierarchical organization. I move around and make changes fast wi…

Thanks for trying us out :)

Spreadsheet like support is not something we currently support but we'll have integrations and also native support coming soon!

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#76

Post by erezsh »

I notice that your directory structure and markdown formatting are very similar to those that are used by static site generators such as Hugo or Nikola.

Do you have, or thought about, integration with one of these?

I like the idea of writing my notes in Dendron and being able to automatically publish them (or a subset of them).

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#78

Post by majkinetor »

I just use awesome GistPad [2] vscode extension and add tags to notes (just array of #tag1 #tag2 in description).

This is accessible easily via various tools on ad hoc place (mobile, browser or whatever), such as GistList [1], GistPad / vscode has some good filtering features and I can download all gists locally and use any file manager to filter out tags. Its also a collection of mini git repositories with all nice things (revisions, multiple files etc.) and me not having to think about any of that.

You can easily go from there to graphs and folders and other advanced stuff (PlantUML et al are all possible via extensions) if you need them, but I have around 200 notes and do not usually need any of that. What I do need is an easy system not depending on any particular technology - all parts of it can be replaced with something else or nothing at all and still be usable with regular OTB OS tools.

[1] https://gistlist.ksdev.pl/

[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-con...

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#79

Post by moondev »

majkinetor wrote: post #78

I just use awesome GistPad [2] vscode extension and add tags to notes (just array of #tag1 #tag2 in description). This is accessible easily via various tools on ad hoc place (mobile, browser or whatever), such as GistList [1], GistPad / vscode has some good filtering features and I can download all gists locally and use any file manager to filter out tags. Its also a collection of mini git repositories with all nice…

This is fantastic, thanks for the recommendation. Great example of lightweight implementation and really supercharges the usefulness of gists.

Re: Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

#80

Post by Groxx »

ncallaway wrote: post #49
endisneigh wrote: post #8

How are people using tools like this and Roam, Obesdian, etc. etc. etc? Personally I could see the use if you were writing a book or something, but I feel like in practice for normal notes I would just have all of these notes that I'd never look at again or spend so much time traversing my notes and not getting things done. As someone with distractive tendencies I'd love to hear the situations where this is useful so…

I use Obsidian pretty regularly. I started in earnest about 6 months ago, and I've been really enjoying it. I like it because it's a wrapper around a folder of markdown files. I really my notes being just a folder of markdown files, so that's the selling point of Obsidian to me. I can open my notes in VSCode just as well as Obsidian, if I'm editing. Obsidian gives me some nice functionality (backlinks, hotkeys for di…

>... it could disappear tomorrow and VSCode would take over as my notes.

Yep. This is why I've been enjoying Obsidian too. I've been able to organize how I want, and it works just fine... and it keeps working, without not-so-subtly forcing me into a new structure that I don't want, just to work with it more smoothly. (e.g. Notable)

On mobile I just use some other markdown app (Epsilon is marvelous for reading). Nearly every single one works great with a folder of md/cm files. If I can't even do that, just opening plain text files works fine. The lack of lock-in is wonderful.

Post reply on HN