If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app (2 for open source note taking app), I'd be set on rent money for a few months. What about note taking makes people want to invent their own app? Is it just bikeshedding? Spending hours writing a note taking app sounds like a perfect way to not end up taking notes and to not use said notes to accomplish much.
I think part of it has to do with a sort of mythos around note taking. This is pure speculation, but it seems to me that part of the reason note taking apps are so popular is that we've built this cult of productivity that is very much magical and religious in the sense that we think 10x producers simply must have some secret trick, that they meditate, take godly notes, have supreme organizational skills or...something...we're all looking for the secret sauce, the silver bullet.
There's this latent idea of "man if only I could get a proper note taking system in place I'd be doing killer work", put another way, "we aren't successful because we're taking notes the wrong way! (not because our ideas are not good or because we simply are not one of the lucky few that will make it)" which unfortunately, is usually false. We like to focus on little micro improvements to our processes because they tangentially relate to work and feel productive, but at the end of the day, are still just another form of procrastination.
All that said, I use org mode and you should too :P
While I do think that there is a lot of hype and "productivity porn", there's a good 10% of it that is really on to something.
There is obviously an itch that needs scratching in personal knowledge base software. That has certainly been my experience. I can see from the outside it might just look like 100% hype.
Personally, my life has been vastly improved with note taking software over the last four years. I can't imagine going back now. Some people I'm sure are ok with just a big text file.
The software is almost not important. A new knowledge-base language is emerging, with Markdown-like formatting, but less emphasis on html style page breaking, [[wiki style]] links, and various syntaxes for backlinks and metadata.
I've gone from vim-wiki, to various other systems, and migrating I was able to just do with some simple perl scripts.
But my knowledge wikis have been effortlessly growing. I have a git repo now with many submodules for my different wikis.
I really think that we are looking at this the wrong way. This is not nearly that much of a technical problem. This is just at the awkward stage where we are figuring out the best patterns for personal knowledge. It's not a problem that we will solve, but at least some good general strategies will probably emerge.
Personally, I mostly just use a roam-like wiki, but I also have two Zettelkasten submodules as well. My two zetts deal with such different domains that it would be more helpful that they be in completely different namespaces.
But yeah, most of the software is crap. The best tools I have found have been small user scripts for editors. I used an Atom based suite that handled my digital gardens. I've been moving to FOAM.
I think the best thing you can do is try to learn from what has worked for other people, and not get too hung up on any one technology.
Because this particular task really feels like the killer app that we should already have -- frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc.
Where I think people are going off the rails is thinking that this can work as a business. I'm hugely skeptical that there's a market here; businesses rely on some measure of "if you don't pay you can't have this part of the thing." -- and even if a startup is able to make this work, it's likely that the "value-add" will be easily replicable into something free (as in freedom) owing to the nature of this being a "power-user" thing.
For example, none of these things promise too much more than, e.g. Zim-wiki (longtime user here) -- which itself is extensible either as FOSS, or simply owing to the fact that it saves in Markdown-ish, immediately MAKING it extensible anyway.
Exactly my thoughts. Note-taking should be a solved problem, but for some reason it isn't, yet. I'm loving this note-taking app renaissance, because in a few years we'll converge to something stable.
It's quite similar to the proliferation of code editors from 2005-2015ish. For a while, practically every language had its own IDE (for me, I remember using HaXe and FlashDevelop). Then, editors like Atom and Sublime came along, raising the bar. For the past five years or so, seems to be the default. The excellent extension system allows people to worry about features, rather than re-creating the IDE.
When it comes to note-taking, I expect the same thing to happen--we just need a good, open-source foundation. I fully expect that the winner will be a wrapper around ProseMirror [1]. See also ReMirror [2]
Language specific IDEs are less because Language Server Protocol solved this real problem. We converged on a good enough solution.
But unlike IDEs and programming language support, note-taking is inherently personal. There is no one-size fits all. I am more disorganized than otherwise, but I prefer separate tools for separate occasions. I like pen and paper for quick jot-downs and napkin math, notepad++/Sublime for quick copy-pastes, OneNote for $DAYJOB and org-mode for long term knowledge base and blogging.
I am sure real people exist who prefer one over the other on more than one occasion.
> I'm loving this note-taking app renaissance, because in a few years we'll converge to something stable.
Being pessimistic, but I would bet it will be a walled garden. The solution will probably be key-in-hands and the easiest way for this is a traditional webapp. Not many people care about data ownership and bother dealing with their own file server.
See Notion, Google Keep, WorkFlowy, Dynalist, etc.
I'm afraid of this too--that's why I'm rooting for Athens!
It's pretty clear from e.g. Roam's pricing that they're primarily targeting institutional licenses. They seem to have been pretty successful there, too.
Once Athens arrives, I fully expect them to eat Roam's lunch when it comes to individuals.
> Because this particular task really feels like the killer app that we should already have -- frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc.
The killer app is "context aware indexing", not notes...
This reminds me of the truly excellent (as they all are) short story by Ted Chiang - The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling [0].
We've gotten pretty good at recording everything, but recalling it at the appropriate time and context is still the big challenge.
When Roam started becoming popular, I began hearing about Zettelkasten. It's yet another note taking system, except that it focuses on the context of when you might need the information, rather than just what's the best way to sort/archive it. A new way of thinking, to me.
> frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc.
You mean a piece of paper with a filing cabinet? I’ve been trying note taking apps for 15 years and nothing beats a plain old notebook for ease of use, flexibility, and helping me think.
I don’t do filing cabinets so retrieval has suffered. And for me personally that hasn’t been a problem because most of my notes are ephemeral. When I’m ready to save something long term I write a blogpost and let Google take care of the rest.
PS: the main issue with most note taking apps is that there’s just something fundamentally different about thinking on the keyboard vs. thinking with a pen in hand. Digital pens have so far not been able to replicate the feeling for some reason.
It's great that pen+paper works so well for you! I hope you can understand that other people have different workflows, and would prefer something like a personal wiki to organize their thoughts. The recent surge in note-taking apps is all centered around this idea.
For me, I like to save URLs and write a short note about everything I read. Typing is much quicker than hand-writing, and I can easily embed images / math / etc..
Agreed. A keyboard is fine for hammering out thought that's already relatively structured, rote notes on a subject, or for thoughts I've worked out to some extent already. For me, pen and paper are leagues superior for any kind of thinking that requires creativity or delving into the unknown.
> If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app
There indeed had always been many but I've never seen anything nearly as cool before Roam and Notion arrived.
And we certainly need a free self-hosted alternative to be able to use this at work without uploading company-confidential data to a 3rd-party black-box cloud.
Athens is pretty far behind most alternatives. I use logseq.com and it is miles ahead of Athens and even edges out Roam in a lot of aspects. i.e. it’s based in md and org-mode and all data is stored locally and synced with GitHub. The team is great and super responsive (minutes from message to new deploy) and are open sourcing after beta. They took all the best features of all the trendy note taking apps and put it into one beautiful piece of clojure web app. Super recommend!
This doesn't seem ready for use yet. Another Roam alternative I've been using that seems pretty much complete and has the benefit of letting the user host the data is
This is currently my go-to, has a pretty good update cadence and the team is pretty responsive to bugs. It's got the linking and tab search, but some of the UX stuff could be smoothed out a bit better (mostly the expandable right-bar).
Also like that it's just CSS for the theming - I'm kind of particular about my typography so I like that I can set it up the way I want it.
I sync to a private repo and use an (albeit hacky) combination of GitJournal (for creating new .md files in a /mobile folder) and SpeckEditor (for editing files in the repo) on mobile.
I would love to see Obsidian add WYSIWYG support, especially since my documents contain a ton of math that is otherwise unreadable at a glance. I'm normally writing and reading my documents at the same time, so when I use a split-pane editor like Obsidian/VS Code/foambubble most of the time I end up staring at the source pane the whole time.
I'm not fully convinced about WYSIWYG since it can be difficult to debug weird formatting. I wish more tools would investigate the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) space, the only one I'm aware of is https://www.lyx.org/
ProseMirror [1] has (mostly) solved that problem in the browser with an excellent transaction-based wrapper around contenteditable! I highly recommend checking it out. I'm also the author of a WYSIWYG math plugin for ProseMirror [2].
For me, WYSIWYG is essential, since my notes contain a lot of math, and I don't want to stare at LaTeX source all day. For that reason, stopped using Overleaf in favor of Typora [1] for a while, but grew out of it as my note-base became large enough to need a good wikilink system.
Quarantine gave me enough free time to build my own note-taking app [3]. So, these days, when I get frustrated with my note-taking app, I have only myself to blame :)
I'm fairly disappointed with Obsidian so far. While the basic functionality of linking/backlinking works fine, there are too many restrictions in how it works or how I can interact with it to make it anything more than a toy to experiment with. I disagree with your statement that it's "complete", since I consider it quite barebones. It doesn't help that there still isn't an API for me to build the features I need and they're unwilling to open source it.
Hey, I had exactly the same frustration. I like some features of Obsidian (like backlinks), and I like some features of Typora (like math), but no single editor has all the features I want. It annoyed me to no end that I couldn't simply download the source and make the changes I needed. (or write a plugin)
During quarantine I've been working on an open-source alternative called Noteworthy (https://noteworthy.ink/). It's not quite ready for release yet, but keep an eye out the next few months! The source is here, you can technically build it if you try hard enough: (https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy)
The goal is to be as modular and extensible as possible. People shouldn't have to keep re-inventing file trees, Markdown parsing, etc.. This is my first large TypeScript/Electron project so code feedback is always welcome, especially in the early stages.
In the meantime, you might be interested in Zettlr, an open-source editor with similar features which is a bit more stable.
If you don't mind me asking, what features in particular are you looking for in an editor?
You should check out logseq.com! Has all the features you’ve mentioned (KaTeX, beautiful and functional graph). I’ve been using it for hours each day and it’s been amazing, ze mind is so free! Their extensions platform is coming this month though, so it’s not quite out yet.
Oh wow looks great, I'll keep an eye on it as it becomes more stable! Love that it syncs .md files to GitHub. It's also nice to see it using datalog queries, I've been considering that as well for my own app.
It seems to me that the reason note taking is complex, and so fractured, is because of lack of label support in OS's. Data is mismanaged at the data level, and we are looking for solutions to that problem with applications rather than at the OS level where it belongs.
The file tree idea, where a file exists in only one place in the hierarchy is wrong. I'd rather all my notes/files were in one big bucket, but that I could label each, and then sort by labels.
I may want to label a file as 'software', 'tech-architecture' and 'finance' - all of them. When I look up any one of those labels, I want to get all the related content. I shouldn't need to guess which bucket I put a note into. So, I say labels should be data associated to files like modified date, or author.
To fix the problem of 'no label' as part of the data, I try to use a note taking that applies labels for me. But then an app developer is going to want to do all sorts of extra stuff.
I understand that having tons of label data on the file could become ridiculous though. Perhaps the real answer would be to have a hidden metadata file associated with the data itself (eg 'mytext.txt.meta') - labels and any other metadata would go in here, separate to the note 'mytext.txt' itself.
So, I think OS's enforce a data organisational structure on us that is unnatural to the way we think and work. And we seek to fix it with apps. And we will never get satisfaction that way :(
I recently switched from standard notes [0] (which was really interesting because of the standardfile protocol[1]) to Joplin and I haven't looked back.
Joplin has been fantastic so far -- it offers so much value (cross-platform, reasonable design, markdown support, search) for completely free, and with easy sync options and no feature gates. It needs to get mentioned more.
It seems like productivity apps are the wave now, but Joplin is exactly what I wanted -- a simple cross platform note-taking app.
I'm considering hosting a Joplin WebDAV/S3 sync + backup service for something like $1/month billed yearly -- I wonder if people would be interested. Obviously most people probably just use Nextcloud/Dropbox/OneDrive and there's no real reason to trust some random sync/backup service over the other options, but with encryption turned on, the place you sync to doesn't matter and it feels like people might be interested.
Not yet, but plug-ins are on the roadmap[1] and it's my understanding that the plug-in system will be powerful enough to add support for things like backlinks.
Joplin is an open source note taking tool. You can make notebooks, full of notes. It supports markdown, has a decent UI, supports a bunch of nifty markdown plugins, has search, and is just generally decent. Notably it has native (and good) apps for major desktop and mobile OSes. It also handles sync via your choice of clouds, lets you encrypt your data, and is open source. Also has browser plugins for capturing notes from a webpage.
There's a lot to like. True, like a lot of small open source projects, there are some rough edges, and progress is slow, but I believe they welcome new volunteers.
There are, however, a TON of note taking apps floating around at the moment. One is Roam. Roam is very expensive ($15/month; a premium price point in a space that's mostly free or a couple of dollars at most), and has a bit of a...well, almost cult-like atmosphere around it. People that like Roam seem to love it, for some reason. On the other hand, development is fast, and they support TONS of features. Backlinks seems to be a big one. Notably I think Roam is more focused around "blocks" of content than around freeform markdown.
Other options include Notion, Bear, Obsidian, Tiddlywiki, Evernote, Quiver, Dynalist, Workflowy, Standard Notes and many, many, many others. All are excellent options in this space. And now, Athens, which I suppose is trying to be a better, open source Roam?
Honestly, if you care a lot about note taking apps you should dig into it, there's a ton of options and interesting tradeoffs. And if you don't, then....eh, probably doesn't matter much.
I've recently picked up Notion and I like it a lot. I looked into Roam but for $15 per month and with a lot of performance issues, I think I'll pass for now. I'm hoping they work out the quirks because the idea of being able to quickly link different concepts together is pretty neat. Fortunately Notion has backlinks which work for most of my needs and the blocks look nicer.
I used Notion for a while, but found the UI just a little tpp sluggish. And I personally value native apps for tools like this, and Notion's Electron based apps were quite large and slow, sadly.
I love what they're doing, I understand why they picked the tech stack and architecture they did, and they have some really awesome features! ....but it's just too slow for me. (Then again, I'm picky.)
Same experience... There's a lot to like about notion and I chose it over everything else and am using it professionally and personally. But the sluggishness is really starting to bother me
Tried Notion for a while, but it just does too much in my opion, it gives me too many choices. I could spend hours trying to get the perfect home screen and arrange pages into a perfect order. But that's all I did. I spent more time worrying about getting the right structure than actually taking the notes.
I've tested a lot of those note taking app, Athens does not seem to be particularly better than the rest.
My the most favorite app is https://www.zettlr.com. It has a simple concept that I really like: this is just markdown files viewer that has ability to: (1) edit (2) search(also by tags) and (3) link files. And that's all.
Files are stored on a local disc in any folder structure someone wants, can be sync using whatever someone wants - Google Drive, Dropbox, Synology NAS, etc.
There is zero vendor lock-in, as it works on plain MD files without any custom elements.
This is one more Electron app, however in that case it is not especially annoying, there are some lags, but acceptable.
I wouldn't care about the expense if they made a good product. The problem is when it comes to my notes if I don't control where the data is then it can't possibly be a good product.
I have recently started using Fsnotes [1]. Its based on nvAlt [2]. If we are focusing on networked notes, fsnotes supports it out of the box and best part, it is offline; stores files as markdown on my local machine, which I really want. Not sure if Roam or Athens are offline apps, didn't dig too much into them.
I read three levels deep into everything in their readme and still have no idea what it is. I found out it's _like_ a lot of other things that have no description.
It's weird. They've obviously written a bunch, but there's no clear "this is what this is and what we want it to be and this is where we're going". It's all very ... academic and "meta" in a very vague way.
Tried most of them, Bear, DEVONThink, Foam, Quiver, Notion, Obsidian, Org-Mode, Roam, Workflowy, and Zettlr to name a few.
The feature I found to be the best is the "outliner with zoom" from Roam and Workflowy. With that in mind, Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/) is what I'm currently using.
I'm super excited to see an open source approach to these! Frankly I probably won't use it because I like the plain-text-files approach to note-taking, but when I evaluate new options, being open source and self-hosted are very important factors for me (specifically in the personal knowledge management space).
