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Comment by bafe | Hacker News Reader

I had the same impression. They constantly tweak the tools instead of just accepting for what it is and taking their notes/writing their documents. I'd argue if you care so much about note taking software it would be a better use of time to develop your own tool from scratch. At least you would learn something useful and get some experience

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I love the idea of building a bespoke notes app for myself, but then again if I had the time and energy I’d probably build my own everything simply because it’s interesting and it feels like there’s unharvested low-hanging fruit in terms of UX improvements across just about all software categories.

Until then though, I’ll be keeping the tinkering to a minimum. Honestly speaking I could probably get by just fine with Sublime Text, a folder full of markdown files, and Syncthing… the main attractions of Obsidian, etc are little QoL features like separate fonts for prose and code.

I think you described the problem very well: the premise behind PKM/note taking is to boost productivity. If you assume this to be true, the only way to be productive is to stop tweaking endlessly and accept the limitations of your tooling

I made the same conclusion and started making a tool on my own from scratch! Turned out it did take much less effort to build something you are happy with than tweaking existing tools.

PWA with Rails/React, editor is Lexical (because why markdown when you can have note looks pretty), hosted on a machine at home that I connect via tailscale.

I already added LLM integrations too.

I would think so too... and even if it doesn't fit you perfectly at least you learn a lot on the way. If you just play with plugins and tweak existing tools, I believe you won't learn anything of substance

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