One of these days, someone is going to invent a confluence alternative that only supports markdown and doesn’t have nay of confluences stupidity and it is going to EXPLODE and bankrupt Atlassian.
I was looking for a journaling app that didn’t have vendor locking, or required some weird export dump that messed your formatting and folders up. That lead me to Markdown and Obsidian. I love it. And when I die, that shit will still be readable by any basic text editor.
I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good UI, and I’m very picky apparently. And as much as I like Markdown, I like looking at rendered Markdown more, lol. I was just looking at GitJournal and Markor and my god…hideous apps.
I came from DayOne, and their format is some json that I wasnt too keen on for future proofing.
I don’t remember why, but there was some reason I wrote off LogSeq. I tried so many apps but Obsidian was the best fit for me. Maybe I’ll have to try Logseq again and remember…
I’m still figuring out how exactly I want to use LogSeq, but for now it’s kinda acting as a Calendar, Journal, Me Wiki, ToDoList, and general notes scratchpad. I’m not sure how organized I can keep it, but it definitely is nice opening 1 app, and being able to put anything and everything in the journal page for today, just #hashtagging topics for searchability/Discoverability.
Sort of…I’m still testing various apps. The big draw for me to Keep was mobile and web apps. I will often sit at a computer to input even short ToDo because phone swipe keyboards and me do not get along. There is no shortage of Keep clones, but a bunch are missing sync function entirely or require Nextcloud, which is way too much app for my hardware and I’m not standing up an instance just to sync some notes. Here’s a not very formal rundown of what I’ve so far:
Joplin - seems like a solid app and you can easily selfhost the server. But the android app is awful. That and the fact it stores Markdown files in a sqlite db had me look elsewhere
Quillpad - a fork of Quillnote. Looks identical to Keep. Only syncs with Nextcloud and has some quirks. The big one was creating a To Do list with checkboxes from the Notes app in NC displays correctly in Quillpad, but you cannot interact with them at all. So strange.
Zoho Notebook - Zoho as a company is likely the closest you’ll get for a straight up Google replacement. But their privacy policy has some concerning statements regarding sharing data with “market partners”. It was enough for me to keep looking.
Carnet - only syncs with Nextcloud and for some reason the Android app is stupid slow.
Memos - more of a microblogging app. Similar format to Twitter but you can keep it all private and publish nothing. This one has no official app, in favor of a well done progressive web app. Also stores .md in a db file. Incredibly easy to self host. I keep wanting to love this one, but the single column view (think Twitter threads) as opposed to Keeps grid…i don’t know. I still have it up on my server since it takes almost nothing to run and I keep playing with it.
The two contenders for me right now have some amazing promise and nice features already, but it’s whats on their roadmaps that has intrigued me more:
Acreom - not FOSS yet and the mobile app can only sync with their cloud. No E2EE…yet. On desktop it’s great. You can use it without an account and like Obsidian, it stores it in flat .md. The To Do/Task function has some natural language processing that can recognize date/time for due dates like “Deploy patches Wednesday at 4am” would recognize Wednesday as Sept 20th since that’s the next closest date and the time at 4am. I think once they open source it and at least allow local only storage on a phone, it’ll be killer. I’d love to use Syncthing to just keep my pile of notes up to date between multiple devices. Not possible on mobile yet. This one is geared more towards developers to track projects, even offers a Jira tie in (gross).
Notesnook - somewhat recently open source. Has great apps for all OSes as well as a web app. And what is really nice is that the UI is consistent across platforms. They have a paid tier that’s a bit spendy for my liking, but they are working on a self hosting option that will be free of course. The dev did tell me they’re toying with the idea of a charge for commercial self hosters, but definitely not for individuals. This one isn’t in plain .md due to their selling point, which is encrypted everything.
Wow, thanks for the write-up. Joplin, Memos, Acreom sound/look the most interesting. Notesnook’s feature lockouts on the free tier makes me feel like they may not be included in the self-hosted option, that seems like a common practice. But I’ll keep an eye out… I’m gonna copy this whole thing into my page on notes-apps for later reference.
One I didn’t include because it either requires specific hardware, or some hacky workaround is Synology Note Station. Great app, and I got it up and running using a docker container that runs their proprietary OS. Other problem is the mobile app is not nearly as good.
As you can tell, I love notes apps. So the trend of all these Personal Knowledge Management/second brain apps is amazing.
I want to like obsidian, but I find it to just be such a hideous UI. Any community themes cannot fix it. But to mention proprietary. I liked Logseq too, but it has the same problem just not as bad. People really need to not do custom UIs and should stick to native widgets with Material Me support.
Eh, while Markdown is nice I think Dokuwiki’s syntax is infinitively better for any kind of text that ends up involving programming code. It also has a header syntax that makes sense, albeit rather cumbersome. And it also makes a proper distinction between italics and underline which are two different, standard typographical effects and not the same thing as Markdown seems to believe; and between ordered and unordered lists (let alone nested lists).
Just about the only bad thing is I haven’t been able to find an editor that supports it. Probably because, to my knowledge, no self-standing / independent renderer exists for it (the parser and renderer seem to be tightly integrated into the content manager).
I’m vaguely aware of Org-mode but only as an alternative to Markdown. Last time I looked into it, though (years ago), Markdown seemed like a much better option for me for various reasons. Do you have a good argument for why Org-mode is a better choice for common use cases than the relatively universal GitHub-flavored Markdown?
Do you happen to have more info on mobile integration? I can only find one or two apps which claim to support org-mode notes at all, so I’m interested. Kinda assumed it wasn’t much of a thing, honestly.
depending on what you do there are large benefits, for me they are executable code blocks (i.e. jupyter like experience) and way better latex support (if you type equations that are more involved this is rather important).
Org mode is great, particularly if you’re already in the Emacs ecosystem because it can do a lot of stuff. Calendars, executable code blocks, spreadsheets, time tracking, org-roam for more ad-hoc notes and searching, capture templates for ingesting data…
I like org mode’s markup format a lot better than markdown’s. It’s a bit easier to do complicated things with escaping and stuff, and it supports syntax highlighting for different languages in code blocks, and LaTeX markup and stuff (which it can even display inline if you want).
As far as I am concerned the only reason to use markdown is that more people are familiar with it and there’s better support for it on certain platforms. These are certainly good enough reasons to use markdown, but in my experience if you’re in the position to use org-mode it’s just so much better.
I have obsidian installed, but I haven’t really looked into how to use it. It has been on my list of things I should probably learn for a long time now
I was using MarkText and a fairly structured set of directories. I switched to Bookstack which allows me to do essentially the same thing but with a web interface and the ability to share with even using RBAC. It doesn’t do the cool linking stuff though.
I think the use cases are different, as Zettlr seems like a pure publication tool but Obsidian (at least originally) was more of a personal note organizer that grew due to having community plugins.
I do agree though that Zettlr is a better publication tool, though I wouldn't change Obsidian for it as a personal organizer/kb.
How's the Book of Hours? I played a good deal of Cultist Simulator, but it tends to suck me in and I recover few hours later without an understanding what just happened.
I finished my playthrough a couple days ago, after 80 hours. It’s much more forgiving than CS – there’s no lose condition, as far as I can tell. There’s also a shitload more to keep track of, hence me using Obsidian. I personally found the experience of tracking [what books give what resource] and [what resources make what crafting recipes] to be extremely satisfying, but your mileage may vary.
Definitely, I said latex but I wanted to mean Pandoc.
The only thing is that applying a docx theme format to Pandoc was very challenging, although I would blame docx, not pandoc.
Almost completely pure way of storing ideas. With this I mean that you don’t store unnecessary data such as “background should be white” or “left page margin is 1.3cm”. It’s just text. What’s important is what it says + minimal markup.
Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.
I wish browsers would support markdown out of the box, so you could open example.com/some-post.md
Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.
I remember when that is how the web worked. All that markup was to define the structure of the document and the client rendered it as set by the user.
Some clients were better than others. My favourite was the default browser in OS/2 Warp, which allowed me to easily set the display characteristics of every tag. The end result was that every site looked (approximately) the same, which made browsing so much nicer, in my opinion.
Then someone decided that website creation should be part of the desktop publishing class (at least at the school I taught at). The world (wide web) has never recovered.
There are four properties in an accessibility tree object:
name
How can we refer to this thing? For instance, a link with the text “Read more” will have “Read more” as its name (find more on how names are computed in the Accessible Name and Description Computation spec).
description
How do we describe this thing, if we want to provide more description beyond the name? The description of a table could explain what kind of information the table contains.
role
What kind of thing is it? For example, is it a button, a nav bar, or a list of items?
state
Does it have a state? Examples include checked or unchecked checkbox states and collapsed or expanded states for the <summary> element.
We’re getting closer to winter. I’ve got most of those preparations done. “Just” have to finish building the heater for my shop. My programming based project list is coming together: learn me some Rust, contribute some documentation to a project I’m following, look deeper into the potential of the Accessibility tree. That should keep me busy for a while!
It’s a simple and elegant way of covering 95% of document structuring needs, while being as close to readable plaintext as possible.
The vast majority of documents currently written in MS-word could just be markdown. The vast majority of web content could just be markdown. This would save the modern world petabytes of XML bloat.
If you need something fancier, either use a vector format or do fancy client-side styling.
The thing I dislike most about Atlassian products is that each of them has a completely different formatting engine and markup syntax. You’d think they’d be consistent but noooo
Atlassian doesn’t even have consistency within single products! I’m using Jira Cloud at work, and while most fields support markdown (e.g. three backticks to start a code block) there are a few that only support Jira’s own notation (e.g. {code} to start a code block). It’s always infuriating when I type some markdown in one of the fields that doesn’t support it for some inexplicable reason.
I’ve been having trouble getting syntax highlighting to work on my ‘```’ fenced code blocks. I give it the right/supported language identifier, but nothing changes.
I’m using neovim with a bunch of lsp plugins and treesitter. Anyone have dotfiles with markdown code syntax highlighting working?
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