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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't seem ready for use yet. Another Roam alternative I've been using that seems pretty much complete and has the benefit of letting the user host the data is

https://obsidian.md/

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This is currently my go-to, has a pretty good update cadence and the team is pretty responsive to bugs. It's got the linking and tab search, but some of the UX stuff could be smoothed out a bit better (mostly the expandable right-bar).

Also like that it's just CSS for the theming - I'm kind of particular about my typography so I like that I can set it up the way I want it.

I sync to a private repo and use an (albeit hacky) combination of GitJournal (for creating new .md files in a /mobile folder) and SpeckEditor (for editing files in the repo) on mobile.

I would love to see Obsidian add WYSIWYG support, especially since my documents contain a ton of math that is otherwise unreadable at a glance. I'm normally writing and reading my documents at the same time, so when I use a split-pane editor like Obsidian/VS Code/foambubble most of the time I end up staring at the source pane the whole time.

I'm not fully convinced about WYSIWYG since it can be difficult to debug weird formatting. I wish more tools would investigate the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) space, the only one I'm aware of is https://www.lyx.org/

ProseMirror [1] has (mostly) solved that problem in the browser with an excellent transaction-based wrapper around contenteditable! I highly recommend checking it out. I'm also the author of a WYSIWYG math plugin for ProseMirror [2].

For me, WYSIWYG is essential, since my notes contain a lot of math, and I don't want to stare at LaTeX source all day. For that reason, stopped using Overleaf in favor of Typora [1] for a while, but grew out of it as my note-base became large enough to need a good wikilink system.

Quarantine gave me enough free time to build my own note-taking app [3]. So, these days, when I get frustrated with my note-taking app, I have only myself to blame :)

[1] https://prosemirror.net/ [2] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math [3] https://noteworthy.ink/

I'm fairly disappointed with Obsidian so far. While the basic functionality of linking/backlinking works fine, there are too many restrictions in how it works or how I can interact with it to make it anything more than a toy to experiment with. I disagree with your statement that it's "complete", since I consider it quite barebones. It doesn't help that there still isn't an API for me to build the features I need and they're unwilling to open source it.

Hey, I had exactly the same frustration. I like some features of Obsidian (like backlinks), and I like some features of Typora (like math), but no single editor has all the features I want. It annoyed me to no end that I couldn't simply download the source and make the changes I needed. (or write a plugin)

During quarantine I've been working on an open-source alternative called Noteworthy (https://noteworthy.ink/). It's not quite ready for release yet, but keep an eye out the next few months! The source is here, you can technically build it if you try hard enough: (https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy)

The goal is to be as modular and extensible as possible. People shouldn't have to keep re-inventing file trees, Markdown parsing, etc.. This is my first large TypeScript/Electron project so code feedback is always welcome, especially in the early stages.

In the meantime, you might be interested in Zettlr, an open-source editor with similar features which is a bit more stable.

If you don't mind me asking, what features in particular are you looking for in an editor?

You should check out logseq.com! Has all the features you’ve mentioned (KaTeX, beautiful and functional graph). I’ve been using it for hours each day and it’s been amazing, ze mind is so free! Their extensions platform is coming this month though, so it’s not quite out yet.

Oh wow looks great, I'll keep an eye on it as it becomes more stable! Love that it syncs .md files to GitHub. It's also nice to see it using datalog queries, I've been considering that as well for my own app.

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