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Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion

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Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion

#1
I'm a big fan of Notion, having used it for 7 years. When I first met Notion, it was just a block document editor, and it didn't excite me until it released the Database. Later, I learned about Airtable, and a bunch of similar products, all of them are SaaS, with such powerful tables but poor performance. Why isn't there a personal offline version table? Most of the time, I don't need to collaborate with others. What I really want is a personalized, offline version of Notion with better performance and more flexibility. So that I can have full control over my data.

Notion, like most SaaS products, is not open-source, so I can't customize it to my heart's content. I can only wait and vote for new features, but I can code, and I don't want to wait. I really like the concepts of FOSS, solid, and local-first. SaaS could die. Long may the SQLite. So, I built Eidos based on sqlite for managing my personal data throughout my lifetime in one place. Eidos is a long-term project for me. It looks like Notion, but the core is more like "obsidian.sqlite" with a powerful extension system.

Here are a few key ideas:

- Eidos is built based on sqlite-wasm and runs entirely in the browser. It can be used immediately, with no installation or configuration required. It's a pure PWA, with full offline support.

- A block-styled document editor and an Airtable-like table, built on top of SQLite, where each table is a real SQLite table.

- A powerful extension system inspired by Figma plugin and Cloudflare worker. You can write scripts in TypeScript directly in the browser. It is easy to manipulate data in docs, tables, and the file system. It also supports API.

- If you're not a developer, you're still in luck. We're living in an AI era. LLM empowers people to craft their own software without writing any code. Eidos deeply integrated with LLM. You can translate, summarize, talk to your data, process table data in batches, and more. It makes your life easier with AI. You can fully customize your prompts and freely choose your LLM provider, without being locked to any vendor.

To be honest, so far, there are still some bugs and shortcomings, and it hasn't yet reached my envisioned perfection. There is still some work to be done, but the basic framework has taken shape. I've been working on it for a year and have eaten my own dog food for the past half year. To help Eidos become better (and celebrate the release of the Elden Ring's DLC), I've decided to make it open-source and gather more feedback. Now, I'm going to take a break and play Shadow of the Erdtree.

- https://eidos.space

Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion
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Re: Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion

#3
You maybe want to check the trademarks for this name, there are some for it. Not that this must become a problem, but it's better to avoid potential problems early.

Besides that, SQLite seems promising, but not sure how exactly this relates to everything. The website is talking about saving in browser, and there is no release on the GitHub. Is this something running in browser only?

Re: Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion

#4

You maybe want to check the trademarks for this name, there are some for it. Not that this must become a problem, but it's better to avoid potential problems early. Besides that, SQLite seems promising, but not sure how exactly this relates to everything. The website is talking about saving in browser, and there is no release on the GitHub. Is this something running in browser only?

Yes, the first thing I thought was, “Tomb Raider”!

Re: Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion

#5

You maybe want to check the trademarks for this name, there are some for it. Not that this must become a problem, but it's better to avoid potential problems early. Besides that, SQLite seems promising, but not sure how exactly this relates to everything. The website is talking about saving in browser, and there is no release on the GitHub. Is this something running in browser only?

Thanks for the reminder. I know this makes SEO more challenging, and it also reminds people of a certain game company, but I really love this concept, which originates from the Plato's theory of forms, and it pairs perfectly with the eidos.space domain name. While it may not be a great business name, the concept itself is exciting.

Eidos is deployed on Cloudflare Pages. it's a purely frontend project and the web is only used for distribution. In order to iterate faster, I didn't use GitHub's release yet.

There are some enhanced experience services running on serverless, but they are not necessary. For instance, adding a bookmark block to a document requires fetching extra information through a URL. This relies on https://github.com/mayneyao/link-preview . Most of the CORS related work is implemented through Cloudflare worker. These services are not necessary. Moreover, they are open-sourced and can be self-deployed. For more details, see https://github.com/mayneyao/eidos/blob/main/lib/const.ts#L64

Re: Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion

#6
I am a big fan of Notion but lately it's like they have been asleep on the driver seat. If they only offered custom extensions I think they would do so much better. I have recently switched to Obsidian but I am not fully committed yet, so i will give this a try.

My only critic so far... It seems you copied one of my least favorite "features" from Notion which is to force a default "Title" column for the tables. I find that most of the time I don't need a Title column, but I can't turn it off nor can you change it's type.

Re: Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion

#10
Some questions:

1. How to use extensions? I can create one (it looks like a javascript function getting some context and one argument) but I have no idea how to invoke it. I expected to be able to invoke them on selected text.

2. Does it sync on other computers / browsers or is it only local?

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