kevinslin

You're right, there is overlap in the sense that both Dendron and Foam are open source note taking tools based around vscode and markdown. Dendron differs in our focus on structure - while we support backlinks, wikilinks, and tags, the primary way of navigating notes in Dendron is by hierarchy which can be described by schemas (our type system for note hierarchies). We provide extensive tooling around traversing and manipulating this structure (lookup, refactoring, etc)

For a more detailed breakdown, you can see the foam vs dendron page here -> https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/p5fMTi-6zOyX1TwhL6dM0.html

short answer - yes. we plan on enabling this, optimistically end of the year, or beginning of next year at the latest

Got it. Yeah this was something that was subject to internal soul searching. The landing page for Dendron was our wiki for the majority of its existence -> https://wiki.dendron.so/ We hired a design firm to make it pop but then went too far in the other direction. When we have cycles, we'll take another stab at finding a happy medium.

Yep. Developer tooling has been making massive strides over the last six decades, all focused on the problem of making information (aka code) easier to manage. Dendron builds on top of this and applies it notes.

In terms of the compiler analogy to notes, in Dendron, this is the schema (aka type) system we use to help users define the structure of their notes: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75c...

Could you elaborate? You mean how animations are tied to scrollevents? (our web team might be influenced by the apple landing page...)

that is how Dendron currently works. But VSCode supports WYSIWYG functioanlity inline. You can see an example of it here: https://github.com/tejasvi/markless we're planning on implementing something similar soon!

thanks! we try to be both compatible and open about everything we do. more details on that in our handbook -> https://handbook.dendron.so/

VSCode (or vscode compatible IDEs) is the main interface for Dendron. that being said, we do expose a CLI for a large subset of features and will ship and web version early next year!

No apologies necessary :)

so we have the split preview today (edit in one window, preview in another). vscode supports combining the two using either webviews or custom editors. you can see an example of that here -> https://github.com/tejasvi/markless

we're planning on implementing a similar featureset

so a couple of things you can do.

dendron creates a `dendron.yml` file and a `dendron.code-workspace` file when you initialize a dendron workspace. if you're in a different vscode workspace, as long as one of the folders has a `dendron.yml` file, then dendron will treat that subdirectory as your dendron workspace.

moving forward, we're looking to support the concept of a `global workspace` that you can access anywhere

resizing can be done using our image syntax. eg. `{max-width: 300px}`. no support for cropping from inside dendron though I'm almost sure there's at least one vscode extension that can do that

obsidian is a great app and they have an excellent mobile client. if you ever want to explore the structural components of Dendron while using Obsidian, you can as we interop on most features

Awesome, let me know how it goes. We have an obsidian to dendron guide here -> https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f9b4fc21-7613-4c8a-9257-cec4c0...

builtin support currently for images - we have a command to insert a copied image into an asset folder and link to it in Dendron. we also have custom syntax for controlling image styling (https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49fe-8164-a17acd...)

for other assets, we current recommend that you drop into the assets folder and link to them. vscode provides a bunch of extensions that let you preview different assets (eg. mp4, pdf, etc)

VSCode also supports WYSIWYG using either webviews or their custom editor API. that's actually something we're looking to implement soon!

Yep. we actually share almost everything in terms of source code and strategy. For business plan, see https://handbook.dendron.so/notes/f6d9bc09-04b7-4a02-a6aa-a2...

Awesome! We have a dedicated teams support channel on Discord, if you ping me after you join or email me (kevinlin@dendron), I'll be sure to add you to it!

It terms of the presentation - thanks for the tip. We have a backlog item to swap it out with a higher res video

I think there's now a blurred line between todo app and knowledge management, especially as tools like notion (and for that matter Dendron), are making it more viable to manage todos within your knowledge base.

As for YC, I remember seeing at least two other note taking companies within our winter batch. At AWS, the mentality for new services is to "let 1000 flowers bloom" (and see which one's make it). Something similar is happening in the note taking space right now

Happy to hear!

We actually have quite a number of D&D players using Dendron. was thinking of organizing something for world builders inside our discord. Let me know if you would be interested :)

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...

Thanks Dan for the extra context!

In terms of what's changed since the last post - we have done a soft product pivot from note-taking for everyone to knowledge management for developers. This is because we found that non-developers struggled with a lot of development basics unrelated to Dendron (eg. navigating vscode, git, etc) which made us realize we still had more work to do to make Dendron intuitive for everyone.

On a product side, we have also released a brand new publishing platform based on ReactJs and NextJS that developers can use to generate their static sites based on their Dendron notes.

That is the start :) And if that's all you want to use Dendron for (eg. a markdown editor with better integration to vscode and git), then you can.

But if you want to expand further (eg. you now have a few hundred or few thousand notes), Dendron adds additional syntax and structure to make that manageable.

Yeah, note taking apps are like mushrooms these days and it sometimes feels like everyone is doing it.

I think the reason you're seeing all the development here is because how *humans* manage *knowledge at scale* is fundamentally an unsolved problem (this is why people keep building new tools).

My friends give me grief about doing cloud computing for over half a decade to work on a local-first note-taking app. There is some overlap though - it is impossible to keep even a small subset of AWS (which now has over 200+ services) in one's head. The only way to use it effectively is externalizing the relevant details in a way that I, as a human, can retrieve. In many ways, trying to externalize my mental model of AWS was a great proving ground for many of the fundamental ideas around structure used in Dendron

we actually have a lot of users that use both Obsidian and Dendron. Dendron is mostly compatible with Obsidian (wiki links, note references aka obsidian embeddings, etc) and we have a lot of users that use Dendron's desktop vscode client and Obsidian's mobile client on the same set of notes to get the best of both worlds.

Interesting - I'll make sure we fix that. Thanks for reporting! If you join our discord(https://discord.gg/AE3NRw9), mention this post and you'll earn a special badge :)

https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/7c00d606-7b75-4d28-b563-d75f33...

lots to say here, most of which is covered in our initial blog post about why we raised money -> https://blog.dendron.so/notes/N9VxT7G5SovmncezBAGO2/

tldr: no one knows how to do knowledge management at scale. Dendron has a viable solution and we're building a team to become the knowledge base for every technical team in the world

for the personal hosted offering - its still available though we don't advertise it as we're focused on polishing the local version this year

in a broad sense, any area where people struggle with having too much information can benefit (if that sounds like it could apply to everything, its because it can). the reason for our focus on developers is because the concepts we introduce (eg. schemas, type systems, refactoring, etc) are already familiar and so there's an easier onramp to a tool like dendorn. the goal is to make these fundamentals intuitive enough that everyone can use

an analogy I use here is excel - no one was born knowing how to use a spreadsheet but the structure and functionality it provides make it a pre-requisite for anyone working with numbers today. dendron's end goal is to be like excel, but for general knowledge

in terms of current non-software use cases, we actually have as many non-technical users using dendron as technical. some popular examples include authors (dendron is popular for world building), gamers (we have a professional street fighter user who uses dendron to keep track of different character movesets), and students (they use dendron for our ability to support math notation and diagrams)

You're right - Dendron has a lot of similarities with Obsidian. A lot of our users come from people looking for open source obsidian alternatives. Our main differentiator is our focus on structure - we let users create their own taxonomies using "Dendron schemas" which they can use to both document and change their note hierarchies over time. A big focus in Dendron: how do you continue working with your knowledge base after you pass 1k notes? Our answer: by having a consistent structure to all your knowledge so you can quickly reference what you need

More details here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a84ff014-e871-445d-9366-d97f1a...

thanks! it started off as me trying to make a "better note taking tool for kevin" and just kept growing from there

hey appreciate the mention!

Im the creator of Dendron. we’re an open source, markdown based, git backed note taking tool built in to vscode. the nice thing about being file based is that interop comes (almost) for free which means as a user, you can switch between tools without worrying about lock in