kevinslin

If you fall into the *Big-Ass Text File* approach, I would recommend Dendron.so It's an open source plaintext based note taking tool that runs inside VSCode with the option to add additional structure to your text using schemas (think type system but for your notes)

(disclaimer: I'm the founder)

would recommend checking out https://wiki.dendron.so

it’s an open source, local first, markdown based note taking tool that is integrated with vscode/cli

(full disclosure: i’m the creator and happy to answer any questions as well on our discord: https://discord.gg/NDYd9nYkM3)

you beat me to submitting the ec2 classic post. but only fitting that it come from you :)

plaintext works well because it is universal and interoperable with everything. markdown is a great compromise in terms of keeping the portable format while giving you a bit more power. the article talks about reaching outside of plaintext for certain content - another approach is to adopt a plaintext note taking tool that has better supported for more complicated note types.

plug: i'm the creator of one of these tools (dendron.so) which I use to manage over 20k notes in plaintext

Worst comes to worst, you could export using a library like this one: https://github.com/kjk/notionapi

That being said, definitely not ideal and is always a risk when storing your data with a SaaS service (disclaimer: I'm the founder of dendron.so - a fast open source notion competitor made for developers)

joplin is one of the initial open source note taking tools with cross platform and device support. they were an inspiration for me for making my own note taking tool.

shameless plug: if your looking for a modern dev focused note taking tool, would love to get feedback on what you think of https://wiki.dendron.so/

notion is slick and is one of the reasons why note taking has come into the spot light as of late (the other being that information is overwhelming and we, as humans, still don't know what the best way of managing it at scale is)

shameless plug: i'm the founder of a yc backed open source note taking tool. for notion users, we describe ourselves as basically notion but made for developers - local first, open source and super fast.

https://wiki.dendron.so/

Urls are the foundation of the internet and it always makes me sad when navigating to a page results in a 404 instead. On a somewhat related sidenote, this is why I created a note taking tool that publishes *permanent urls* - because your notes can change but your links shouldn't :)

https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/2fe96d3a-dcf9-409b-8a09-fdaa5a...

Thanks for trying us out :)

Spreadsheet like support is not something we currently support but we'll have integrations and also native support coming soon!

Yeah, we don't do outline in the workflowy sense. we do outlines in the sense that we have shortcuts to create notes from bullets and autolink the new note. not the same but gets close. you can see an example here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/593206ea-5658-4874-bafd-18a138...

Yeah, those are some of the core features that I can't live without. A lot of the reason for building in VSCode is because they have a good VIM extension :)

Yep. We have quite a number of technical writers using Dendron. Dendron also integrates nicely with public projects - we support publishing docs as dendron pages with github links back to the original project. This results in publicly referencable docs that can be cloned and used locally. See example here: http://tldr.dendron.so/

Dendron supports mermaid diagrams: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/eea2b078-1acc-4071-a14e-18299f...

So Dendron does this. We have a shortcut to automatically embed images as well (https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49fe-8164-a17acd...).

I describe Dendron as basically notepad with additional features :)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Some additional details on the cons:

- 1) Mobile support. We don't have a mobile app but you can access it on mobile using tools like GitJournal or IaWriter. Admitted this is not ideal but we do plan on a native mobile solution later this year. See FAQ here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...

- 2) As for navigating notes, this depends on your style. If your use case includes always having the preview side by side, then navigating with Dendron is not always consistent. If you mainly use the markdown view, navigation is our strong point since you can navigate and create links without leaving the keyboard

- 3) Yes. We don't have full text search but vscode text search is quite good, especially if you combine it with the [search editor](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/692fa114-f798-467f-a0b9-3cccc3...) which lets you create new docs from search results. we also have guides on how to use dendron with elasticsearch [here](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...)

- 4) As for order with notes, there's a few thoughts here. You can embed notes into other notes using [note references](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f1af56bb-db27-47ae-8406-61a98d...) and control the order there. for how it displays in the hiearchy, its alphanumeric sorting. custom sorting is something we can implement if there's enough demand. for lots of short notes, this is where I would push back. VSCode has a fantastic windowing system which lets you split your editor into multiple panes (that can be automatically maximized). I regularly have 5-6 panes open at any given time that are views into different notes, sometimes the same notes. this is actually one of our strongest features since tools like notion only let you view one note at a time

I'm thankful you gave us a chance and do know that we're working on all the points you mentioned!

the dotted namespace has been a back and forth in our community. some people love it, some people not so much.

we're still using the dotted namespacing but we've also introduced the ability to export your notes to plain markdown (it inlines dendron specific markdown like note references to regular markdown). if you have folder based markdown, you can import them to dendron's format using our markdown importer and then export them to the same format as well (this is coming soon)

At the core, Dendron is a tool to help you manage markdown files with consistent naming structures :)

And for the most part, I don't use HTML rendering but Dendron gives you easy ways of creating notes from links, creating relative links to files, and pasting images into your markdown.

I was a long one note user. I think they have great UX. I found it difficult to export from one note or drill down to something specific quickly. If it helps, we do have a bunch of former one note users as well as scripts to convert from one note to markdown

See here on the differences between Dendron and Obsidian https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...

tldr: obsidian is easier to get started with and is good for free association of notes. dendron is better integrated into the development workflow and is amazing at helping you organize your notes into well defined hierarchies

For mobile, a lot of our users use gitjournal or an equivalent app. Since your notes are backed by git, anything that supports git will work.

Also looking into building a draft like mobile app later this year to support your use case of quickly adding to existing nots.

See mobile use cases here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...

Dendron is similar to foam. We support all the features of foam but put the emphasis on structuring and organizing your notes.

Dendron helps you organize your notes into hierarchies that you can enforce using schemas (think type system but for your hierarchies)

The problem we're solving: once you have hundreds or thousands of notes, how do you find a specific one?

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

Dendron's main difference from obsidian is that we put the emphasis on structuring and organizing your notes.

Obsidian (and other tools like it) focus on backlinks and using a graph to connect your ideas. This is valuable for connecting disparate ideas but its still hard to find any individual note once you have a lot of them.

Dendron helps you organize your notes into hierarchies that you can enforce using schemas (think type system but for your hierarchies)

The problem we're solving: once you have hundreds or thousands of notes, how do you find a specific one?

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

We've been doing weekly iterations so there's been a bunch of changes between posts.

As for the learning curve, yes, you're right and we're working on it.

We just launched a new tutorial: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/678c77d9-ef2c-4537-97b5-64556d...

One of our users also made a great video series about Dendron on egghead: https://t.co/qIRvQqtttZ

nice find! just fixed

Founder here. I started Dendron because I was frustrated with the lack of good note taking tools while working as a developer at AWS.

I wanted something with the ease of notepad, the structure of evernote, and the speed of redis.

Iterating over these features led me to Dendron and its been battle tested with my own collection of 30K+ notes

Appreciate the additional insight. I really wanted to like GCP - they have good people and good tech.

This whole onboarding felt like some caricature of what I thought were exaggerated stories of how bad the support was.

Since this thread is has a lot of note taking enthusiast, going to also suggest https://dendron.so;.

Dendron is a scalable note taking tool built on top of VSCode. It's similar to foam but focuses on a hybrid approach for managing notes notes with both roam styled back links and dendron’s very own hierarchy system. Dendron also helps users selectively publish any subset of your notes as a dendron style digital garden.

Disclaimer: I'm the author and I'm happy to provide any questions or help. You can also drop by our discord community if you just want to talk note taking: https://discord.gg/AE3NRw9

at the end of the day, if you have a note taking tool that you like and are using, then my advice is to stick with it. that being said, we'll be launching an obsidian importer next week to make it easy for folks to experiment with dendron if the temptation strikes :)

You're right, Dendron doesn't easily integrate with web clients yet. Files are plaintext markdown and most of our users are using dropbox/nextcloud setup.

That being said, Dendron lets you publish your notes as static sites (eg. https://dendron.so is just published using notes) and we'll be expanding this feature to do private hosting of notes with limited editing capabilities later in December

Dendron encourages you to put all your content into one note and then gives you tooling to slice it into hierarchies once that note is too big. See https://dendron.so/notes/e780000d-c784-4945-8e42-35218a3ecf1...