kevinslin

I like to have a fairly regular routine with consistent time to wake up every morning. The typical day is divided into four phases:

- morning: start of with yoga and focus on most important work before noon - noon: take a breather with running, have lunch and read up on hacker news - afternoon: more work, mix in nap and meditation to get through the afternoon - evening: wind down, prepare for next day

You can find a detailed breakdown [here](https://kevinslin.com/notes/qm4lvh7xusf8tufke30gr2q)

Zettelkasten was a tool designed for a very specific purpose but of late, is the proverbial hammer that is being applied to everything. As the founder of a note taking tool (dendron.so), I see lots of new users trying out PKM for the first time because they heard about zettelkastenw hen all they needed was a bullet journal instead.

This is my first time coming across LYT - thanks for the writeup!

what do you mean by overhead? do you mean performance or complexity?

nice writeup!

i'm currently working on shipping the publishing side of dendron in a docker (its a custom nextjs app) so that it can be easily tested locally as well as hosted remotely

that's fair. the dot hierarchy has been a polarizing topic with folks falling on both sides of it.

the reason we went with it is because: - it allows a file to be both a note and a parent of notes - it makes hierarchy an explicit part of note creation - it greatly simplified operations like refactoring (regex over filename, no need to create scaffolding with empty folders or removing folders if they no longer had children) - it makes it easy to work with using cli tools

More discussion on this here: - https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e... - https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...

the reason we have our own extension is because dendron is also available on vscodium and the `paste image` extension was not available there

heh, internet is a small place :)

what year are you? is mcmurtry still in-tents?

if you have a public repo or an example note, happy to take a look at it. we've done lots of work on our markdown import and it should address a lot more cases now

I gave in to the temptation - hence Dendron

What issues did you encounter with Dendron? Would appreciate feedback so we can make it better!

In terms of making it available to a wider audience - Dendron comes with a NextJS Template: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/4ushYTDoX0TYQ1FDtGQSg

This makes it easy to publish your notes as a static site. The plan is to add optional server side capabilities here so that it becomes possible to read *and* write notes, at which point it becomes a web interface for note taking. It also helps with the distribution problem (Dendron is used by teams to publish documentation to non-technical folks so it helps that they can access it as a regular webpage)

i think it depends on your writing style. i tend to do a lot of outlining with bullet points so it works pretty well. for longer paragraphs it can definitely be a pain

For folks that already use vscode, the selling point is being able to continue to use vscode for everything, code and markdown. VSCode has an editor experience that is hard to beat

(also, disclaimer: I'm the author of the article and founder of Dendron)

tldr: roam's defining feature, bi-directional links, sound great in theory but break down in practice. if you rely on them as your primary means of finding notes, it quickly breaks down because there's no canonical starting point (by design)

Thought this was a great write-up of the missing link with roam and tools like it. They make it incredibly easy to add notes but after a while, make it incredibly difficult to find those notes again when needed

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of https://dendron.so/, a YC backed PKM tool focused on hierarchies and structured note-taking

Wrote a tweet thread about my takeaways from the article here: https://twitter.com/kevins8/status/1493020520815546368?s=20&...

founder here. let me know how it goes. if you're interested, we do personalized onboardings with new users as well, link to book is here -> https://calendly.com/d/mqtk-rf7q/onboard

Here is a comparison between dendron and foam -> https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/p5fMTi-6zOyX1TwhL6dM0.html

no asciidoc support but dendron's syntax is extended markdown and supports concepts like transclusions, diagrams, and other customizations. see https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/ba97866b-889f-4ac6-86e7-bb2d97...

Something we recommend for folks is to have different flavors of VSCode to side step this (eg. vscodium for dendron, vscode for code). That being said, if you found something you like, that's the most important thing :)

Sorry to hear about this. When did you last use Dendron? we've had lots of updates in terms of performance over the past few months so that shouldn't be the case today

here's a page that outlines differences between obsidian and dendron: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a84ff014-e871-445d-9366-d97f1a... also happy to answer any questions you might have about Dendron :)

Dendron has plans to add WYSWG functionality this year

notable is great! generally, anything that comes down to plaintext markdown is great because of data portability and the ability to apply existing tools over your data :)

I think one reason Dendron (and generally PKM topics) resonates on HN is because fundamentally, we haven't figured out "information architecture for humans"

Google works for the internet but we don't have an equivalent for PKM or TKM (team knowledge management). This is why we build Dendron (more details at https://blog.dendron.so/notes/N9VxT7G5SovmncezBAGO2.html)

Totally agree that mind maps are hard to scale out, either across time or people. This is why Dendron focuses on helping folks create consistent structures (we call them schemas) to help map out their knowledge base. Think of it as a type system for organizing your notes. More details on that here (https://nesslabs.com/dendron-featured-tool) if curious

sorry dendron didn't work out. was there anything specific that felt "janky"? we've had lots of updates on general ux (see https://buttondown.email/dendron/archive/) and are continuing to focus on that this year. that being said, logseq is also a great tool. a bunch of folks use both dendron and logseq in tandem

yep. we have a number of users that do just this

I find that the biggest aspect for development is keeping track of information (eg. documentation, tasks, playbooks, etc) Dendron (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dendron....) is a note taking tool for developers - its open source, built on plaintext markdown, and integrated with VSCode. You can use it to manage your own personal knowledge base and to document your code base.

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Dendron. We recently did a Launch HN post where you can find more details on what we're building: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176158

thanks for the kind words :)

Our beachhead market is to compete with tools like confluence to be the knowledge base for technical teams. To that end, we're building a managed backend for Dendron that will make it possible to sync your notes with teammates, provide a web ui, access control, private notes, and other team features.

More details in our public handbook -> https://handbook.dendron.so/notes/f6d9bc09-04b7-4a02-a6aa-a2...

we actually have a solution in the works - adding a human friendly URL label followed by the guid (eg. wiki.dendron.so/notes/tutorial-{guid}) server side, we only parse the last component of the url which will be the guid. the reason we don't do this now is because we're focused on making static publishing smooth (most people use github pages to host their dendron sites) before we start on work on the server enhanced solution

I was a big user of tiddly wiki back in the day and a fan of the work. One point of distinction for Dendron - we are hierarchy oriented but support other means of organization (tags, backlinks, graphs, etc).

If you're trying to create a model of the real world, you probably want to use a graph primitive to capture the nuances. But that flexibility is what makes things hard for humans - since a note can exist in N places, how do you find it? How do you even know you've tagged/linked it correctly?

Dendron's constraint of hierarchy is one of those "its not a bug but a feature" things - the constraint of hierarchy makes it easy for humans to reason about. What we add on top of that is the ability to refactor that hierarchy when necessary