Like (almost) everyone here, I've gone through a lot of note-taking apps in the market. I ended up with a setup of alternating between Obsidian and Logseq, just like the OP at one point.
I like Obsidian a lot. The text editor-like, but not quite a text editor experience seemed like the sweet spot for me. Among all of the apps I tried, it probably has the best reading experience, especially for long-form writings. But then I realized that it didn't really get me to write more notes, and it now acts more like a catalogue for things that I found online. It's just not that different from writing notes in your go-to text editor, and if VSCode couldn't make me write more notes, then neither would Obsidian.
I tried out Logseq later on, and the experience was the complete opposite. The app got me to dump my brain very quickly; writing notes actually became quite addicting. The problem is I hardly ever got back to re-reading my notes. I just never got used to the workflow of jumping through links and reading blocks that look hastily patched up together.
Wish I could find a way to make a reading experience as pleasant as Obsidian, and the writing experience that's as engaging as Logseq. A this point, though, I'm sort of stuck with these two.
I'm a dedicated Obsidian user at this point, but totally agree that discovery could be improved significantly. Maybe a context-sensitive search, like how when you're entering a new question in StackOverflow it gives you suggestions of questions that have already been asked that might be what you mean. So I'm reading a note, and in a side panel it would show me other notes that seem related, regardless of whether they're linked to this one. And when I'm typing, it might populate a window or feed in the sidebar with suggestions of notes that have similar content. I think that'd help a lot in discoverability, and in promoting better knowledge management as a whole by prompting me to curate related docs instead of editing them in isolation.
That idea of a sidepanel showing a feed of potentially related notes via fuzzy search or something would be such a game changer. Tempted to learn some clojure just to implement this in logseq…
I had the same experience, so I assigned a keyboard shortcuts Cmd+Shift+F and Cmd+Shift+H for global search and home, and that mitigated it a little bit. These should have had shortcuts out-of-the-box.
It's still a little awkward to get out of the search mode and back to editing mode. What would be ideal is hitting "Esc" should take you back to the listing mode and move cursor back to the last edit location.
IMO: Obsidian does a good job in making me reflect and review notes, but not enough to prompt me to write more of them. Logseq does the exact opposite.
There's nothing wrong with Obsidian per se, but that's probably the crux of my issue with it. I'm not very naturally inclined to taking notes in the first place, and Obsidian just hasn't made me take that many more notes than I used to.
Logseq on the other hand has an editor that makes it hard for you to even write longer / multi-line blocks. In some ways, I suspect that writing in bullet points or smaller blocks encourages shorter but more frequent note writing, and my brain seems to respond well to that. Obsidian can technically do that to some degree, but the editor doesn't do enough to make me write shorter and more atomic notes, even with the Outliner[0] plugin installed.
Insane how you as well as OP have the same setup as me. I also initially tried Dendron but did not find the experience that pleasant as it was basically the same app in which I was programming in (VSCode). So now, I have decided to take notes in these two apps (I had commented the same thing a while back) for a longer period and then compare these two.
I recently dived more into obsidian (coming from Bear) and I must say I really like it so far.
I'm not using the personal knowledge management bit too much yet, but as a note taking app it's great.
Moreover, the plugin ecosystem (which I've just started exploring) is excellent!
I.e. there's a plugin for downloading highlights from your Kindle books, which also creates referencable refs for each highlight and lets you easily embed them in other notes. Cool stuff.
It's also impressive that most plugins work on the mobile app too.
My one gripe – and it's a big one – about Obsidian is that it just does not give one whit about trying to integrate with macOS. It feels like an Electron app that the developers just checked the "macOS" checkbox on; like I'm stepping into the captain's chair of a capable but ugly tugboat when I Cmd-Tab over. (Which is a shame, because it is a capable boat.)
Basic hotkeys are modal, somehow (Open Help from sidebar. Try to use Cmd-W to close). No interface tabbing support (this app is likely an a11y fire). No proxy icons. The menu bar is supremely basic – and they don't capitalize their own app's name ("About obsidian"). The command palette calls Finder the "system explorer." Somehow no print support, anywhere. Custom context menus abound.
Best one: close the main Obsidian window on macOS and try to figure out how to reopen it. (Reopening the app is one... there's one other way!)
Apple makes it difficult to develop apps from another platform (unique low level libraries like Metal, requiring a Mac for publishing). I think one result of this is that cross-platform app authors who aren't ALSO primarily MacOS users just kind of throw their code over the fence and hope it works. I can't blame them.
>My one gripe – and it's a big one – about Obsidian is that it just does not give one whit about trying to integrate with macOS.
This might get better soon.
@kepano, the developer of Minimal, is working on a new "default theme" for Obsidian. He said it "will follow many of the same design principles as Minimal, particularly in making Obsidian feel native across platforms. It will differ in that it will prioritize accessibility and affordances more than Minimal does. In addition the new default theme will make customization and theme development easier than before."
I like Obsidian, but yea, there are some fundamental weirdnesses as a result of it basically being a web app. It'll never feel all that native.
For me though, much of the real issue is the iOS app. I feel like it needs some big modifications to how it operates in order to make quickly doing particular things a lot easier.
When I'm on my phone, the biggest thing for me is I need to take a quick note. I'd love to just open Obsidian, click a button to let me put a note in an inbox, then when I'm on my Mac I can sort the inbox like I would a task manager. I don't generally do deep work on my phone, I only really perform reference and quick notes type actions.
Is there somewhere one can view that work? I have to admit I'm skeptical, because most of the parent comment's complaints are pretty fundamental to how the app is built.
But I share their gripes, and it's similarly important to me. And I'm currently trying to choose a tool in this category to adopt.
Release notes can be found on the Obsidian forum[0]. Roadmap is on Trello[1]. You can also learn more via the official Obsidian Discord group.
The app will continue to be developed with Electron, however Electron does provide APIs for things like native menus. Making Obsidian feel native is a high priority currently.
The latest public release (v0.15) contained several improvements towards that goal: multiple window support, native fonts, native scrollbars, native app menus.
Currently in progress is a new default theme I am working on. I previously made Minimal[2] as a community theme, which was designed around the goal of making Obsidian feel native on macOS.
Obsidian has really been a life changer for me, mostly due to Anki integration, and live mode with its support of mathjax which makes everything look so neat.
I've tried Dendron before: it's really cool, but the lack of live mode and the messiness of the notes (i.e. lack of clear hierarchy makes my head spin when navigating notes, though it's a feature not a bug for certain usecases) makes it so unappealing to me. But then again, I used it as a solely note taking app, as opposed to knowledge manager.
Also, forgot to mention, the excalidraw plugin is absolute magic, and works great with an iPad.
TLDR: You can embed excalidraw drawings/diagrams in your notes and edit them there. Moreover, inside of the excalidraw diagram you can use markdown and arbitrary obsidian references, so it composes both ways.
I've followed a similar path to the author. Tried Notion, loved until it went down for 8 hours without offline support, and then moved to Obsidian with github sync without any plug in.
But time and time again I keep asking myself why. In the end, Sublime (or vim) actually is just enough for how I use Obsidian.
The only thing missing is a good reference management system; linking my own notes seems like trying to solve the wrong problem; all I really need is to keep track of what sparked those ideas/notes, and then I don't necessarily need to keep track of my thoughts;if they were meaningful I will deduce it from those references anyway.
So I just went back to Zotero for reference management. Quick notes can just go in to a big text file and then refactored later. (bonus for spaced repetition)
Obsidian is a nice app but it feels like it's a product solving the symptoms (wrong priorities in note taking) rather than a tool to support healthy habit
For those looking for an Obsidian like tool for commercial usage, check out Foam[0]. It covers most of the core Obsidian features and it's implemented as a VS Code extension with all of the advantages that entails. Of course, you won't have access to the Obsidian extensions and I do miss the live preview feature and the Android app but it's way more than serviceable.
If you're giving Foam a look, also consider svsool's unfortunately named "Memo" (previously Markdown Memo): https://github.com/svsool/memo It's a VSCode plugin for groups of Markdown notes similar to Foam and Dendron and inspired by Roam. I prefer this to Foam. One of the unique features Memo has is that links inside folders/namespaces
don't have to be absolute if the name itself is unique, which is surprisingly convenient.
Isn't Dendron basically the same thing? It's built on VSCode as well. Foam was literally mentioned in the article and didn't scratch the author's itch, but I'm not sure why it didn't but Dendron is.
Dendron is built around the dot.namespace.hierarchies which are a nifty way to organize your PKM and implement "Folder Notes" feature. Foam is more traditional, file system based. Very like Obsidian, like I said. I was able to _sense_ the extra man hours Dendron's had but yeah, otherwise basically the same.
The big difference, is FOAM notes are meant to be flat (or you can use folder I guess) and you explore just via the links whereas Dendrons have hierarchies of notes.
So "food" is a note about food in general, "food.chinese" is a note under food that's about chineses food, "food.chinese.tao-chicken" is a note about tao-chicken under chinese-food, etc.
You can also just skip notes in the hierarchy, so you could have just "food" and "food.chinese.tao-chicken" and a placeholder "food.chinese" would appear in the graph.
I personally really liked the note/subnote model used in Zim Wiki, but that program wasn't great for code snippets or to write graphs so I'm pretty excited about Dendron. In comparison, trying to connect my notes is just such a pain with a flat system like foam and Obsidian.
Your notes are not under other notes in Obsidian, just inside a folder. Also files in a same folder doesn't affect the graph in any way. The the graph it all looks flat and notes are linked only by the links you explicitly wrote. In comparison, Dendron graphs shows both explicit connections, but also the parents/children.
Dendron's dot.namespaced.hierarchies were an instant "I want that" when I first run across it[^1] but yes, I've become wary of over opinionated tooling for my notes that require specific and idiosyncratic architecture/metadata to function. (and this one's VC backed no less). And this goes for Obsidian extensions as well: if it litters my vault with all kinds of metadata that's not easily accessible or useless when the tool and/or Obsidian finally becomes unusable, no thank you.
1: yes, you can implement this using #forward/slashes/and/tags but you lose some velocity when it's not the core organizational primitive.
I've tried quite a few notes apps, Standard Notes is the one I always end up going back to. Obsidian is a solid choice though. The main issue I have is that notes apps always try to grow into full-on documentation or collaboration platforms. That's not only unnecessary, but it always over-complicates the most basic operations which is what you do most of the time.
Some of the time, I am tempted to go back to my original system which was just a local git repo full of Markdown files and opening the folder in Atom / VS Code.
The main reason I use Standard Notes at all is the encrypted backups to email and sync across devices. I don't think there's much more functionality required other than a decent Markdown editor for note-taking.
I tried Joplin but the Android client was so bad to put me off using it to take notes at all.
And I mean, Obsidian on Andorid is basically the desktop app taken out of electron and put into the web view as is, so I don't have high requirements here.
But Obsidian crossed the threshold and Joplin did not.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has bounced around between note apps with varied success. I too have settled mostly on Obsidian, especially for work. The Markdown support is excellent and I am finding some useful plugins.
I do still use a mix of Apple Notes and Standard Notes for personal note taking. As the author mentioned, using Obsidian for both personal and work feels a bit cumbersome - especially in my case since I can't use the same Google Drive for both due to corporate policy.
I've moved from Evernote to Obsidian this year and like it so far. It reminds me of code editors, it was clearly inspired by them.
The markdown notes and attachments are just plain files on my disk, they can be backed up and synced across devices. On Windows and iOS the iCloud sync works well. The notes are available offline on my phone which is a must-have feature.
I don't use many plugins, but it's great that the app is extendable like that. I've written a small syllable counter plugin myself and it was pretty easy to find my way around. Unfortunately the official docs are... lacking, so poking around other people's code was the best way to see what's what.
I find just using something (logseq for me) and turning it into a habit is so much more effective than worrying it's not quite right and trying to optimize by finding the perfect note taking app. Can it handle markdown? Can I search? Can I sync across devices and store it encrypted at rest? Good enough.
It's very similar to the people who constantly fiddle with dotfiles but never starting / finishing a project. There's this anxiety in doing that we cope with by doing adjacent things and fooling ourselves into believing we'll eventually do the actual thing.
Guys, if you want to do - "but my favourite is x", please spend some time going into why it works for you and why it can work for others in general. Also kindly mention their presentation stack on desktop and phone.
I also switched between some of those apps for quite some time until i found Trilium Notes. https://github.com/zadam/trilium
It's open source and you can self host it to be available through web browser for the time you're at work and don't want the files to be local.
It's very stable so far and has all the features i need.
I tried trillium and found it interesting but a little difficult to use (I prefer markdown to their editor). Then I tried editing on mobile and it really was awful. It was mostly impossible to use the contextual menu. Some words got doubled when I typed them. Pasting did not work.
So I came back to a folder of markdown files synchronized with syncthing that I edit with markor on Android and vim or vscode on desktop.
Since this touches more regular note taking apps such as Evernote and OneNote I would like to give a shout out to Joplin. After using Evernote for 10 years or so I figured out that this would be the year I switched.
First impression of Joplin is very good! Both desktop client and app seems fast, much much faster than Evernote. Setup of "self-hosting" against a S3 bucket was easy enough (had an issue with S3 URL needing region, something that was not mentioned in the docs).
It does not have all the fancy functions of Evernote (and rest of the apps mentioned in this thread), but for just keeping a collection of notes it seems to cover the basics I need (notebooks, good search, markdown support, easy synch across clients etc).
I'm also happy with Joplin. If I could change one thing I'd make it plaintext based, instead of SQLite. I don't use it for media/web clipping and I suspect it would speed up syncing (which takes around 5-15 seconds, even for incremental changes).
I also found this a bit strange at first, but my guess without diving into the code is that since all searching is done on the client and not through an server side API, SQLite is probably the best way to achieve this performant across all devices and platforms.
I’ve gone through most of the notable note taking apps. About a decade ago, I tried to use Tinderbox[0] but it didn’t stick. I attribute that mostly to assuming it would provide some structure.
Recently, after giving up on Obsidian, I went back to Tinderbox. This time I read the creator’s book (The Tinderbox Way) and it clicked. The programmability with agents, note prototypes, and so on really works well with what I’m doing. Linking is simple, much like roam or Obsidian.
It’s pricy and it has a bit of a steep learning curve but if you push through, it’s really powerful.
Mark was my college roommate! Ted Nelson was an earlier Swarthmore graduate whose visions for information anticipated the internet, and remain somewhat contrary to how the internet evolved. Mark took all this to heart. I had a brief influence on Tinderbox, when Mark got interested in hyperbolic geometry as one view of information.
Mind mapping is a critical application of computers, still in its infancy. I have thousands of math articles in digital form that are beyond my ability to track from memory.
My primary need isn't note-taking. I want a "Finder" alternative for managing digital assets, my own folder structure that I independently store and sync. I want to wander through old papers and open them in readers on both MacOS and iOS, at the speed of daydreaming. The timing of my herd paths, and some deliberate annotations, should be my gardening influence on a largely automated process for discovering proximities. I'm still not sure what tools to use, so I slowly write my own.
FWIW the way you describe a “Finder” is how I use DEVONthink. I app-link articles I’m thinking about from Tinderbox to DEVONthink which is really handy. I store the database in a webdav share and often read/annotate on my iPad. Then I write any thoughts or notes in Tinderbox on my MBP.
May work for you. It’s taken a long while to get here but I think I finally cracked my digital note taking needs.
My one remaining need is a Tinderbox iOS/iPadOS app. Even if it’s reduced functionality, it’d allow me to get the meat of an idea down quickly.
I find Roam Research to be the the most zen note-taking app. The database takes a lot of mental overhead away and just allows me to write, and I know I won't have to deal with files and folders at all. You could mount a Logseq graph in a location where it isn't easily accessible to other programs and yourself, and restrict the permissions to read-only expect for the 'Logseq' user, so that you think about the plumbing less often. And the new sync that they're adding will make it all even more zen. Syncing with cloud services or using Syncthing gives me a bit of anxiety over data loss.
But their pricing is insane. Importantly, the reports of people losing everything is insane. Further, the guys just went and banned/blocked anyone making any complaint on Reddit or Twitter.
Their tech stack also sounds dumb. I stopped using their tool on principle on top of the insane pricing.
> Further, the guys just went and banned/blocked anyone making any complaint on Reddit or Twitter.
It wasn't "the guys". It was the CEO. He believes the best use of his time is monitoring Reddit threads and banning people. He posted an official policy that any negative comment or any mention of a competing app is a permanent ban - even if you're a paying customer.
I gave Roam a comprehensive evaluation last year before deciding to go with Obsidian, and paying for Obsidian Sync. I posted a short comment in one of the threads listing the reasons I didn't go with Roam. He could have learned from my comment. He could have ignored it. He banned me. A few days later, he banned Ramses Oudt, the leading community advocate for Roam, for making a negative comment.
That's a little more drama than I'd like for a notetaking app I'm paying to use.
I got lucky and snagged the sync product before they doubled the price, so I'm grandfathered into that. But even $50/yr is a fair bit given it's really just a storage mechanism. $50 isn't that bad, but I would give a hard no at the full price of $100/yr.
Worse, the publish feature... holy insanity this thing is. $192/yr to publish a single repository.
Yea, it's pretty bad. My vaults aren't even 3mb, so it's really expensive, regardless.
I just don't understand at all how they came up with the pricing. If they need to make money, make the app a paid product for like $10 or $15.
Everything they put a price tag on is astronomical.
* Catalyst (for early access) $25+
* Commercial $50 per year
* Sync $8/mo ($96/yr)
* Publish $16/mo ($192/yr)
The app remains free, so it's clear they're trying to subsidize the cost of the app by cranking up the dial on the extra services, but I'd rather they just charge a reasonable price for the app and make the addon services reasonably priced. I'd be happy to pay like $10/yr for the app, and if, presumably, enough others were it would probably make them MORE money than the add-on services because a larger portion of their user base would have to pay for the app, and probably wouldn't shit a brick at $10/yr or something reasonable.
How is £$165/year not nutty? That is more than I pay per year for Amazon Prime, Spotify, Disney+, MLB or The Economist. All for basically being able to just write text in a browser and store it.
I do grant you that for some prolific (borderline pathological?) note takers who wouldn’t mind paying that money for an app they spend a lot of their time in. That’s why the price alone was not a dealbreaker for me.
In a vacuum, perhaps $165/yr would be OK for some people. But when compared to other options that are mostly as nice for a fraction of the price, it's a bit much for me.
I'll call it; for an app in this space, anything other than FOSS or perhaps a one time deal like Obsidian's model is 100% a bad idea, and self-hosting must ALWAYS be a first-class citizen.
It's perhaps ironic that this reverses "you get what you pay for," but experience should teach all of us that these subscription type deals are strongly likely to screw you, usually through some change in the business model.
(Personally, tried org-mode in the past, have also played with Obsidian, but for me http://zim-wiki.org is the perfect combo of easy and extensible)
Logseq with Git is solid, very hard to loose data, and is the best option for ownership of data / GDPR compliance / privacy. But Git isn't for everyone. Looking forward to sync also.
Yup, I've been doing this for months. It seems like they recently removed the automatic commit feature from the app itself and instead moved it to this little script: https://github.com/logseq/git-auto
Well that's good to know. But I still say the OG logseq was the best of these apps: open source (mostly), plain markdown, visually clean, backlinks, browser accessible (so no issues jotting down a note from literally anything with an internet connection), almost zero friction for note-taking... It was just the best. Now the contortions we have to go through to synchronize notes is painful. A cynic would say it's a deliberate choice to make the paid sync more appealing, when previously it was unnecessary.
Athens is getting there as an alternative, but I wish they were markdown-based for portability.
idk what you're talking about, they have a pretty easy script. The only thing they've changed in this regard is removing the periodic auto-commit feature which wasn't very good in the first place and the github repo as a back-end, which was also half-baked and not very good. IMO they've only improved things and have not shied away from dropping features that do not work as they intended.
Moving from a simple, browser-based, git-backed model to something that requires bash scripts and git hooks and still has chronic sync errors and requires installing apps (that may not be available for a platform or installable for security reasons)? I mean, I respect that not every use case is the same and I'm glad many people find logseq useful (as I still do), but, from my perspective, they have significantly increased the friction of using what was an almost magical tool for capturing transient thoughts at high speed anywhere. I do like the features they are adding, which is why I continue to use it, but it's definitely not the magic tool it used to be.
Pretty much anything before they announced deprecation of github integration. You would have to self-host the legacy backend (which is doable, but it's not simple). I apologize for not knowing the version number, but it would've been, oh, maybe 2 years ago?
I use Dendron daily for work. The main value it provides for me is a shortcut to create a daily journal note, and a quick organizational structure. That’s it. I don’t do anything fancy with it, but just this simple functionality is enough for me. VSCode search works well enough to search daily notes.
I find the biggest benefit for me is that it’s low friction to record things that I otherwise wouldn’t.
I have started some organization, but things that I want others to know end up elsewhere like Confluence.
I’d love to use something like Dendron in my personal life as well but I would need it to work from my phone, and be easily shared with my wife.
Here's my current PKM app rundown, from my own notes on the subject:
# NotePlan 3
Pros: Native, and so nice to use.
Cons: Bottom line: the author doubled the subscription price in the upgrade from version 2 to 3, and is experimenting with doubling the price again to $120/yr. Few plugins.
# Obsidian
Pros: Tons of useful plugins. Huge community support.
Cons: Lacking daily notes like NotePlan and Logseq. Not native.
# Logseq
Pros: Data entry is very ergonomic.
Cons: As of 2022-07, still regularly seeing updates that fix data loss. Moving toward proprietary sync service? Not native.
# iA Writer
Pros: Native. Great UI. Already paid for it. One-time purchase.
Cons: Lacks daily notes. Just recently added wiki links. No backlinks. No plugin API or Shortcuts support. No Mermaid.js diagrams.
I send iA Writer an email about once a year begging for the option to allow creating notes with date-stamped filenames (e.g. `2022-07-27.md`) but I think my emails are being redirected into the void.
(They do have shortcuts support, though, for whatever it's worth...)
Obsidian has daily notes, though as a Core Plugin which needs to be enabled in settings. I haven't used NotePlan or LogSeq, so maybe those daily notes are very different, but once I made a nice template I found Obsidian's to be quite nice.
To expand on that, NotePlan has beautiful daily note support, with built-in keystrokes for things like "go to yesterday's note", "go to tomorrow's note", or "move the currently selected action(s) to tomorrow's note (but keep a link back to today so that I can easily see the context in which those actions were originally written)".
Obsidian has fine support for automatically creating a correctly named note, optionally pre-populated from a template, but lacks all the extra niceties. That's not a failure on its part, just something that it doesn't do as nicely out of the box as NotePlan.
I have been using Notesnook[0] for over a year (mostly because its encrypted and private) and it has helped me tremendously. Obsidian is too text-editor-esque for me. I haven't tried Logseq or Dendron though.
I actually like how Notesnook forces you to keep your organization at 2 levels. Restricting at first it helped me simplify my workflow a lot and finding things is a breeze since I know it can't be more than 2 levels deep. For some reason I can't wrap my head around interlinking; hierarchy based organization is good enough for me.
Taking notes doesn't need anything else.
Aside: the recent news about Notesnook going open source[1] has gotten me really excited. This might actually turn out to be a notes app I stick to. Let's see where the winds blow...
I've been on logseq for a while now and while I do genuinely recommend it, it is not without its issues. On recent versions I've faced issues where the page I'm typing on gets completely deleted. I end up having to go into Dropbox's web interface to restore that page. I'm fairly certain this issue is due to Dropbox and Logseq interacting with each other in a weird way, but regardless it has brought me a lot of headaches. Looking forward to them finally releasing their own syncing solution.
Other than that, the main issue I struggle with in these PKM/Zettelkasten style note taking apps is discoverability. I write down a lot of notes, but it is hard for me to find my way back to them. The benefit of hierarchy-based notetaking systems, where things get placed in folders and subfolders, is that at least I can get a big picture of my database at a glance. I've yet to find a nice way of doing this in logseq and its cousins.
SimpleNote works very reliably for me (including sync across devices) and always loads quickly, including on mobile devices. I find the most important thing for note taking is just the ability to quickly get stuff out of my head and browser tabs, including only when mobile is available.
SimpleNote is missing organizational features (just has tags), but their search works well and it seems enough for personal use. Most of the new note taking apps are tackling organizational knowledge sharing and are bloated (slow and resource intensive) for the personal use case. I do use coda.io for organizing knowledge with tabular data.
I've become increasingly convinced that the best format for note taking for me is plain Markdown, with a metadata header. Then I can bring my own editor that matches my needs in the moment.
For example, if I want to do some long-form writing, I can open my directory of notes in iA Writer. If I want to grep the files, I can jump to the command line.
Any note app that enforces more of a structure (requiring lists in Markdown, or with its own idiosyncratic naming scheme) is just lock-in, and within a year or two I'll be on to another app.
Full disclosure, I'm developing a very minimal iOS/Mac/commandline app with this philosophy.
Sure! It's pretty straightforward—at first glance it's just a note list on the left with a Markdown editor on the right. The differentiator is that you can twirl a disclosure triangle to view & edit all the metadata fields in the editor, and you can use those fields to search for notes. To help build out that metadata, the editor can optionally capture some context (e.g. location) when you create a new note.
I like dendron's dot.namespace.hierarchy, human browsable flat file system.
But even VSCode can be slow and buggy, loaded with plugins from being used for other things. It would crash on large notes.
So I implemented the file naming scheme in my own folder, and have it open in Atom. Shift-Ctrl-F can search through all notes. Done.
All this linking of notes, creating a "knowledge graph", having a schema... is extra. It requires more effort than benefit I've EVER practically received. It's a cool hobby, and I love to organize things. But I'm trying to spend less time fiddling with tools these days.
This article does address my main gripe with Obsidian:
> But for me, I don't use the mobile app much often. (...) The only thing I need is to capture a thought quickly.
I don't use the mobile app often _because_ the only thing I need to do is capture a quick thought, and it isn't very good at that. I'm still figuring out a setup with QuickAdd + Advanced URL + Tasker, but it'd be better if this was built into Obsidian's mobile app.
I’ve searched far and wide for the best quick mobile capture tool over the years. The best I’ve found is Braintoss, which lets you record a voice note, then sends the transcription and the recording (in case the transcription was wrong) to your inbox of choice (usually used with a task manager’s unique email address for your list). Pair this with the Apple Watch app and it’s incredible.
Second to that is google keep, which also has that style of capturing, but doesn’t work nearly as smoothly on iOS, and has no way to integrate with another app.
Third up is Drafts for iOS, which is by far the fastest on-the-go mobile note taking app if you’re typing. They have great integrations (but for automation you have to use Shortcuts). The only reason they’re ranked third for me is their voice note story is not good enough.
You can capitalize on the fact that you don't need to use Obsidian to add notes. It's just Markdown (plain text) files on the FS.
You can create a little script to catch your thought and put it in a file somewhere in the Obsidian vault. You can use iOS Shortcuts or (maybe) Tasker for Android to do that.
These programs will not help you organize your thoughts; they work if you have already organized them. Some seem to think the causation goes otherwise.
I'm generally not looking to organize my thoughts. I'm looking to record my conclusions and ideally some way to see the history of that.
I too often feel like my brain is like Twitter/etc. I read an article, but summarize it heavily and forget the rest. I want to A: record the summary, so at least i don't forget that, and B: ideally record a few facts that lead to that summary-conlusion-thing. So if i have to rethink my conclusion i'll know what source material it came from.
Generally I agree. But I actually think tooling can matter. And in particular I had a very good experience with logseq in terms of importing source documents and then processing them down and integrating them. The main reason logseq works for that is because of the block references (I don't know if other systems have that, but that's what made logseq different and interesting as a tool for processing knowledge).
[Ultimately my problem with logseq is that as far as I know I can't run it through a browser self-hosted. Unfortunately that's what I need at work since I can't install anything and all the remote desktop things are blocked. I'm mostly an idiot about electron but I wish it functioned like X11 forwarding where you could install an app on a port and browse to it remotely.]
Yeah I agree about that. I actually didn't figure out what it can do and how it can be used until I watched a few youtube videos watching other people actually use it and then it clicked. The video that helped me get a vision of ways I can use it was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN6tjeQfxRc This is nitpicking but I wish there were more videos of people just using PKM systems without all the talking about philosophy of note taking etc. A lot of the video was "... wait, you can do that? I want to do that. How the hell did she do that?" which is a good way to learn the tool, but can be frustrating.
Of note: My mode of writing is to collect/generate messes of ideas and then clean them up and organize them iteratively to create structure and polish. I'm one of the people who used to write on index cards and then compose by rearranging them on my bed. I loved abusing Word's outline mode for rough drafts and restructuring and refactoring text and have been trying to explain the missing functionality to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice for over a decade ("we have outline mode you just click the thing" "no it's not about creating an outline of document structure" "hey we improved outline check it out see if it looks better" loops). So when I saw some of logseq in action it was an "omg this looks even better than Word's outline mode" sort of thing. The next thing I wish logseq would do is allow you to double click to explode paragraphs and temporarily separate sentences into bullets for processing and reorganizing.
As this thread is mostly about alternatives and reflecting why they work or not, my 2 cents and 2 apps:
- Drafts - super fast native MacOS app that just lets you start writing text and care about "where to put it" later. I relaized that most of the "notes" or texts become either obsolete or abandoned (Draft removes them after 30 days, I think) and the task of "oh where do I put this in my knowledge tree or folder" becomes a burden. I use Drafts daily for basically everything (even writing this comment in Drafts (will copy it into NH once finished) :)
- MarginNote3 – speaking of a second brain, after trying most of the apps discussed here, I relaized that most of my knowledge lately comes from publshed papers and I need to somehow organize them, search, link and structure highlights, often across multiple documents. MarginNote is in the market of PDF readers-for-study, but it has pretty well integrated study mind-map concept and I found it working much better for me than one global "second brain" with notes.
Drafts is amazing for data entry and for scripting up "...and now send it to X app" actions. It empties its trash folder after 30 days, but notes are permanent unless you delete them. It also supports [[Wiki links]] now, which is great.
The reasons I don't use it for my main notes app are:
- No support for backlinks. Now that I've experienced them with Obsidian et al, I don't want to do without them.
- It stores notes in a database. Obsidian and friends store them as Markdown files in the filesystem, and you can even have 2 apps sitting "on top of" the same content directory.
Oh, and Drafts doesn't support attachments. I have notes that hugely benefit from embedded images, like the one that tells me which windshield wipers to buy for the family vehicle.
I have used both Obsidian and Logseq, and right now, I'm trying out Dendron and liking is so far, especially for my developer log (technical notes).
I like Obsidian for its community and plugins, Logseq for its ability to allow spontaneous brain dumping and dendron for its hierarchical notes and discoverability.
I use QOwnNotes (desktop) Markor (Android) combo. Both are snappy, low frills Markdown editors/viewers/browsers, that let you set a basedir with an arbitrary hierarchy under it.
Flexible and no lock in whatsoever. I use something else to sync the dir and it works like a charm!
Last time I tried Markor there was no way to disable the "formatting keyboard" bar above the regular keyboard and so it would constantly get in my way and take up screen space. Is there now?
I've experienced similar frustrations with notetaking apps.
I'm now working on a tool similar to "Obsidian, Logseq and Dendron".
It came as a frustration of previous tools(I've used ALL of them). They're either not flexible enough, not light enough, not powerful enough, not portable enough etc.
It combines both studying/references. So it's a flashcard(I don't user Supermemo algo tho) + Notetaking. It's also built on a standard so you can develop commandline/mobile/toaster app that is compatible.
Since this is one of those "well, I use [x]" type threads, I have finally settled upon https://www.inkdrop.app/ – it's sort of like the VS Code of notetaking, very extensible and tweak-able, but simple on the surface. The developer is pretty cool too and does some of the best screencasts I've seen. It's less optimized for the "linking" approach often used by second brain tools (which I don't seem to get along with anyway) but there are addons to do some of it.
The only app that has ever worked for me is Bear. I can just hit CTRL + B and start typing..
It has reliable sync using iCloud, markdown, nested tags, integrates in the browsers for clips, supports images and is pretty fast.
The big downside is that it's for OSX only but since I'm always in the Apple ecosystem (and have my iPad/iPhone with all the time me anyway), it's perfect for me. There is a web app in the works as well AFAIK but it's a long time coming..
Bonus points: use the Nebo app on iPad with the Apple pencil to sketch and export to Bear.
I use Notable on Linux and Noteless on Android, with Foldersync for automatically syncing. I tried Obsidian, and prefer Noteless' interface, where I can see all notes just reverse sorted by modification time. Both have a tag view.
I’ve been hoping to be able to use multiple apps and sync between the ones that use text files. It seems like this may be wishful thinking. Obsidian and Logseq don’t appear compatible from the article based on Logseq adding things?
I have a link saved to sync Noteplan 3 (Apple ecosystem only) with Obsidian. I have my Noteplan folder indexed with DEVONthink (Apple ecosystem only) so that syncs up. Having Logseq sync up would be cool too.
I've been using simply a private git repository to sync my raw notes and it's worked flawlessly. I do this on multiple machines and even my android phone. Would you be open to try that approach out?
Logseq, Athens and others uses outlines (Markdown unordered lists) at their core with files being more of the backing store. Obsidian uses plain markdown files. There are Obsidian plugins that provide similar support but it's still for the most part obvious that the notes were written on Logseq.
I went down the rabbit hole only to realize that none of them provide better tooling for organizing scattered thoughts. Now I just use Obsidian's Daily Notes and embrace the fact that no one can provide better note organization, though it still annoys me that it takes seconds to open the app despite the fact that I didn't install any plugins and turned off most of the features that were unnecessary to me.
Yes, I switched to TiddlyWiki a year ago, and haven't regretted it. I tried Evernote, Notion, Org-mode, Dynalist, Zettlr -- and looked at Dendron, Roam, Obsidian and so on.
I think what separates TiddlyWiki and Org-mode from the rest is that they are easily "hackable" and have more powerful syntax, but are also more demanding on the user.
You can modify the UI and add features inside TiddlyWiki itself, using only TiddlyWiki syntax and Javascript. Like if you want backlinks to be displayed at the bottom of every note in a certain way, you can do that.
Markdown is a very limited language when you think about it. (Most of these tools would be better off using AsciiDoc.) TiddlyWiki's WikiText has macros and widgets that let you do things Markdown never will, and your "notes" can become interactive and dynamic.
TiddlyWiki allows you to create a very sophisticated, tailored system for managing lots of different things. But when you begin, it's a pretty steep learning curve, and you'll need to put in more work than when starting with Obsidian, of course.
I'm not too fond of hierarchy in note-taking because the hierarchy isn't fixed. Dendron use `python.data.bool` and `java.data.bool` as an example, but sometimes I only think in the reversed way: `bool.data.python`.
Hierarchies are good, but we should dynamically generate them from content, not hardcode them as filenames.
I don’t know if it even matters too much. You’ll always end up with multiple possible conflicting hierarchies that make sense. I prefer tags that can be interpreted as trees via prefix
It seems that you like using GDrive. I developed docjumper.com which is a better interface to GDrive. It runs entirely client-side in your browser so that there are no added security concerns. But I don't know how much that would help you since there isn't any extra usefulness with Google Keep.
I’ve wanted to jump to something sexier for a long time but finding data deep in my notes is so fast on Evernote. It’s also the only way I’ve found to stay in eats sync btw laptop and iPad.
+1 for Outline! Self-hosted server and web app, clean codebase, loads fast, mobile friendly, actively maintained. I had tried Obsidian, Trilium, TiddlyWiki, and all the rest (not to mention Notion, Bear, etc.). Outline is the first knowledge base I’ve tried that checks almost every box.
(The only unchecked box is that data is stored in a database instead of markdown files, but I decided to let go of that one.)
Edit: Funny, this thread is discussing two different Outlines. I’m talking about https://www.getoutline.com/.
Funny enough, two years since making it, I'm still working on the one liner (creator of Dendron here).
The current one liner: dendron is an open source, developer focused note taking tool that lets you quickly find and organize your notes in vscode using flexible hierarchies.
Given a few more lines, I would add: what IDEs do for programming languages, we want to do for knowledge - that is to say, give you the tooling to manage large amounts of it using concepts like refactoring, lookup, and schemas (think of this as type definitions but for the structure of your notes)
How does this beat my markdown + vim + git stack? Granted I don't have Zettelkasten or fancy referencing features with this but I can always do a simple grep.
Obsidian, for example, has a built-in renderer and a whole lot of plugins that can extent it.
For instance, dataview plugin can query other notes and render result in place. So for example, you have a few notes with a tag "book-review". And in them you use YAML preamble to track rating you gave the book. Dataview can render you a list of books you reviewed and their ratings (even in star form), individual rows linking to the specific notes.
Another example, built-in TeX rendering support, which makes it much easier to read math formulas. Likewise, built-in Mermaid for diagrams.
Yes, Obsidian functions as a personal Wiki, which makes the above look sorta like "Why would I use Wikipedia instead of a 2.7 Gb directory of text files indexed by Bing?", which makes the value add more obvious, I think.
(In case it isn't: links, rendering, and stuff like the graph that gets constructed as you link are _very_ helpful to my workflow)
A simple grep isn't always enough. Backlinks, built in dataviews, attachments, tagging and so on are useful features for heavier use cases. You may not need them - which is no less valid - but many of us do.
I like Obsidian a lot. The text editor-like, but not quite a text editor experience seemed like the sweet spot for me. Among all of the apps I tried, it probably has the best reading experience, especially for long-form writings. But then I realized that it didn't really get me to write more notes, and it now acts more like a catalogue for things that I found online. It's just not that different from writing notes in your go-to text editor, and if VSCode couldn't make me write more notes, then neither would Obsidian.
I tried out Logseq later on, and the experience was the complete opposite. The app got me to dump my brain very quickly; writing notes actually became quite addicting. The problem is I hardly ever got back to re-reading my notes. I just never got used to the workflow of jumping through links and reading blocks that look hastily patched up together.
Wish I could find a way to make a reading experience as pleasant as Obsidian, and the writing experience that's as engaging as Logseq. A this point, though, I'm sort of stuck with these two.