Note-Taking that Grows as You Do
Dendron finds the usable center between unstructured backlinks and rigid file hierarchies. We help users maintain a canonical hierarchy for every note while also allowing for arbitrary backlinks to any other note.
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It's frustrating but completely understandable that the author chose to do this in VScode. The value of having a highly-customizable editor that is extensible in a well-known language is great.
I really hope a true VSCode competitor will emerge in the future that is truly open source and not controlled by a company that does not have its users best interests in mind; all this Linux-friendly stuff Microsoft is doing lately is to basically get people into their ecosystem and then slowly push out Linux and other alternatives (e.g. who's using sublime / atom anymore?). There is some pithy name for this strategy that escapes me, but effectively it is the equivalent of dumping in commerce: use one's cash reserves to sell a product at a loss in order to squeeze out competitors, then capitalize on the cornered market (i.e. "All Hail Microsoft!" after trying to squeeze out others).
I really wish the Xi [0] editor gained more traction, though as an Emacs user I'm hoping the speedup with v28 and the GccEmacs [1] go a long way there. I would certainly like more parallelism though, e.g. `dired` mode not pausing the entire editor when moving a large file, and I've never really become fluent in elisp.
[0] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs
By slightwinder 2020-10-2711:28 > not controlled by a company that does not have its users best interests in mind
The reason VS Code is so successful is exactly because it's under control of a company which has it's users best interests in mind. It's just that the users interest are not identical with some users political interest.
A users best interest is that the tool works without pain and solves the task at hand fast. Anything else comes afterwards. And VS Code is seems to be very dedicated to make exactly this possible. They don't compromise with pointless stuff, and focus on satisfying the most customers. And this works very well so far. Better than any open source-project I've seen to be honest.
By PeterStuer 2020-10-277:231 reply Would the MIT license on vscode not protect you from the scenario you entertain?
Don't get me wrong. VS Code is most certainly a loss leader for the Microsoft ecosystem. This businessmodel for gaining developer mindshare is not new. It was pioneered by the free software ecosystem, but has been the defacto standard for some time now.
By roblabla 2020-10-278:54 Only if people are willing to pick up the maintenance when Microsoft stops working in the open. Now TBF, there are a lot of forks and quasi-forks (VSCodium, Eclipse Theia) that there's hope that there are orgs and people outside microsoft that do know vscode well enough to pick up maintenance if it came to that.
By chrisweekly 2020-10-2710:29 You make some good points, but it's worth pointing out that Sublime isn't OSS, whereas VSC is.
By throwaway_pdp09 2020-10-278:411 reply He was being sarcastic.
By TomasEkeli 2020-10-2710:39 sarcasm works so well in written communication, particularly online with strangers
Maybe you should give VSCodium[1] a try?
By kevinslin 2020-10-2717:48 Dendron is also available on VSCodium :)
https://dendron.so/notes/9134f160-31a6-4ab0-a640-1fce466f952...
By _huayra_ 2020-10-3013:15 Oh nice I didn't know about this. Glad that it's possible to build vscode(ium) without receiving some proprietary blob from the snap store.
By qmmmur 2020-10-2712:17 Well, Dendron itself is now supporting the language server protocol. So in reality you will be able to take your Dendron knowledge wherever that is supported imminently.
I have tried a number of note taking apps including Bear and Notable; I recently switched to MS OneNote because it's cross-platform from OSX to PC, making it easier for me to consolidate all my notes in once desktop app.
It's likely an unpopular choice given it's from 'Big-Co, Inc', etc, but it's hard to beat. My favorite feature that sold me is the ability to tab and instantly create an inline table (with each subsequent tab pressing creating additional columns). It's quite powerful and flexible. You can also add multiple text blocks to a note page allow for extra context to be placed anywhere. This isn't limited to just text, but adding a graphic to an existing text block, again anywhere on the note 'space'
Honestly, it's really quite an impressive note app and I've moved completely off of Bear in favor of it. The syncing is also free, which was something I was paying a yearly sub to Bear for. The cherry on-top is the also free iOS app which works really well too.
That said, I do think there is room for something like Dendron, which is pretty slick and I quite like that it's a VS-Code add-on. I'll def give it a serious look, nice job!
By iterating 2020-10-276:02 When it comes to ease in creating notes, image support, and pen support, Onenote is king. What Onenote falls short on is ease in retrieving notes. It lacks previews, thumbnails, indexes, table of contents, nested tags, or customizable sidepanels. You cant "flip" though your existing notes while keeping the current note or side panel in view.
This is where Dendron shines. Dendron's navigator side panel is clean of clutter and easy to navigate, even when you have hundreds of notes. You can also navigate your notebook by open TODOs, nested tags, saved (regex or non rgex) search filters, or by graph view.
By lazyasciiart 2020-10-273:581 reply I've used OneNote religiously for a dozen years as a daily notes app, but the Mac and Web experiences are terrible and I'm just sick of it not syncing tags across my machines. And now I have a new laptop and as far as I can tell the ability to add tags to shortcut keys is just gone. Why???
By unishark 2020-10-274:34 I've used oneNote a long time, but I certainly click threads like these hoping for something better. I agree the web version sucks and is very buggy.
Also it took a big step backwards when they discontinued the office version and forced everyone to use the app version which has a lot less options. Perhaps that's your problem.
By garettmd 2020-10-2715:04 I like OneNote, but the main sticking point for me is that the mobile experience (at least on Android) is pretty terrible. It's so free-form that when you get to a smaller screen, I end up having constantly scroll around to view everything (maybe they should make it responsive like most websites?).
Also, it has quirky, but very annoying behavior, like how it won't save my position on a page after the screen turns off. This makes it challenging to get back to the step I was on in a complicated recipe (what I mostly use OneNote for now).
By kevinslin 2020-10-2717:49 Thanks :)
Let me know if you have any feedback or questions after you start using it.
I was curious what was different about this than Roam/Obsidian/ect. and checked the FAQ:
> Dendron is a highly opinionated note taking tool that focuses on hierarchal note taking. It provides the freedom of Roam’s every note exists everywhere philosophy while layering on top flexible hierarchies to keep track of it all. [0]
Not sure how I feel about that approach. However, it does look pretty polished and I'll likely check it out at some point.
[0] - https://www.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e8...
It seems that the core features of Dendron correspond most closely to Obsidian's, to the point that I thought it's an Obsidian skin, but Obsidian is closed source while Dendron isn't. Roam is a Web app whose unit of data is a text block - Obsidian's and Dendron's unit of data is a file Markdown file.
By maxioatic 2020-10-2717:22 Agreed. I've personally never used Roam, as I definitely need my files to be in some form of plain text.
Obsidian is cool in my eyes because I can start it up and click around if I want (more of review tool and looking at a cool graph), but in general I just create/edit my files in Vim. That's why I'm unsure about the opinionated hierarchy deal of Dendron. It just seems like another layer to deal with - although not much of a stretch to see a value add with it. Right now, I don't have enough files to be overwhelmed with my ad-hoc structure to spend the time trying it.
By Eugeleo 2020-10-2723:07 There is a way to link to individual blocks now (paragraphs in Obsidian speak). And an alpha plugin API has just been unveiled to the insiders.
(No affiliation, just a happy insider)
