Lately I've been trying some of the markdown file-based editors, mostly to be able to view and edit documentation written by LLMs while working on projects.
I've tried a few. Obsidian, Cogito (in beta) and ZenNote, which I see no one mentioned. For now I settled with ZenNotes because it came with vim motions out of the box. But I'm also liking the Cogito approach, with a much cleaner UI.
I've gone from Obsidian, to LogSeq, to Org-mode on Emacs a few days ago, and I think I'm probably going to stay there.
I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm pretty sure Obsidian is winning not because it's great, but because it mostly doesn't suck, and it runs everywhere. I have little doubt that Bear is a better app than Obsidian.
on the surface, it's a boring hierarchical note taking app, and you can use it just as one, keeping things simple. But then, you can jump into the rabbit hole and figure out how attributes, templates and properties inheritance can give your notes a structure, be organized as collections, and become a very dependable PKMS.
I personally settled on Trilium after a long search for a PKMS to fit my needs, including Obsidian, LogSeq and many others. My top criteria were:
- I need typed notes: if I'm set to maintain long references of People, Places, Movies, … I want the system to keep track of types, attributes, and relations, just like a RDBMS would. In practice, many systems fail at that and give you a ton of maintenance work just to keep your knowledge base consistent, well-structured and usable
- I need something that syncs with my server at home, and lets me work offline when needed. Trilium client app does that without fuss nor requires subscription/premium/membership.
- I need r/w access to my notes on devices which I don't own (e.g. a work computer), so a fully-featured and secure web version with MFA must exist as an alternative to a client application, and again, Trilium delivers there.
I've been daily-driving Trilium for almost 3 years now, and I haven't stumbled upon an alternative with envy. OTOH, Trilium got (much) refined and gained lots of clever features.
I probably sound like the fan that I am, but you can have a look by yourself at https://app.triliumnotes.org/
I like Obsidian because it’s just stores a folder full of markdown files, and I can read/edit those files with whatever I want. It feels like a lot less lock-in than with Bear.
Having to use an LLM to search text also feels like overkill. One of the things I like markdown notes for is the simplicity of it. I can just use grep if I want. I can open the files on a computer from 1990 or 2090 and it will work. Having to bring in all these other tools into the mix hurts that utility. At that point, I might as well just use Apple Notes.
https://mtarin.com/projects/nift/
Core point is simplicity, and frictionless note taking, and high performance, my dev version, can work with 12k notes without any issues.
Data is stored as text file.
Demo version is also available
I am looking for feedback, and wondering what would make people actually interested to buying this.
It's completely hand written, no AI assisted code.
Maybe you have perfect memory, but I have found it critical for my job.
it's all already known
"It" may not "all be known" but thanks to Einstein and other physicists we can be confident we're not going to find resolution to human biology's real problems circumlocuting entirely rhetorical political and economic theory shat out of academia the last 30 years of the 1900s, or same old religious allegory
Whole lot of information is 100% noise; as forgetable without issue as what you had for dinner on March 27, 2003; yeah you forget and don't track a lot of stuff that keeps you alive; I doubt sending an email on schedule matters much either. Just our contemporary social and communal role-play.
What's left to learn is pretty much moon shot physical experiment; generic office work 10s of millions are skilled in is not going to move the needle
I'd think we'd have Plato and Aristotle to thank for public illustrations demonstrating the limitations of utility in sophistry. And even they were probably not the first to realize that the hot air wooing the counselors was nothing more than theater.
Plato and Aristotle were still largely philosophers. Their work was superficial rhetorical induction; writing how sun go up there, go down there pattern, jist deciding the universe was organized with Earth at the center; we fail kids today who would give that as an answer. Not sure why Aristotle is still held up as especially smurt since he was dumber than a modern 12 year old.
While they influenced habits and practices in STEM their results have almost entirely been superseded many times; dubious to try and draw a line from them to today; centuries of the same old human politicking, mud hut tribalism ruled most of humanity for centuries after they lived.
Meaning 150ish years after electromagnetism and relativity are published and look at the world we live in. For us society effectively started in the late 1800s not in ancient Athens
For example, editing a set of tags causes endless frustration. I can never guess what the tool will do next or what it expects me to do.
Why?
Compare that to being forced to use someone else's highly opinionated software that might have paid pro features you need or don't need.
What a strange question to ask.
I see people vibing out markdown apps like they take their morning shit, while I just paid Bear a small amount of money and have gleefully used it every day for 10 years, and I hope to continue to use it for at least the next 5.
Part of maturity for me over the years has been picking my battles carefully and reducing the things I feel I need to be opinionated about or responsible for. Not every piece of software needs to be perfectly customizable for my workflow or the fastest or embody some esoteric philosophical ideal. Being forced to do anything is a rarity unless your job requires you to use SharePoint or Notion or whatever
They worked on a file backed editor at some point called Panda, but decided to scrap it due to the trade offs of not controlling the storage format. Really respect the focus on their core USP.
Edit: Looks like Panda was recently revived under a new name and is currently in beta: https://lettera.md.
The support is super friendly and responsive and sync just works perfectly and consistently.
Their only response to the AI mania has been adding an official embedded cli to interact with the DB safely.
They are currently working on a web client. This has me slightly worried, but it's apparently been a recurring request for people forced to use Windows at work. I trust they know what they're doing.
To be honest I just use a code editor with markdown files in a folder now. The journey is over.
If you want the basics, sure. If you want a well-polished app with no sharp edges, I think we're still not there yet.
Bear also becomes noticeably slower once you drop all those images into your database.
For example, I can ask my AI note taker things to look through all of my meeting notes with a particular customer and pull out some testimonials for my website.
It even lets you switch to "Source Mode" for quick edits.
Luckily the paywall is mostly for export tools and cloud backup. The latter I don’t need, and it’s only a minor inconvenience to use Airdrop + pandoc for the former.
> Back in 2013, three friends who loved Apple and design couldn’t find a notes app they liked, so they built their own. That side project became Bear.
“Bear is a beautiful, powerfully simple Markdown note taking app to capture, write, and organize your life.”
If I had to choose one I'd use Obsidian because Bear's features are a subset of what Obsidian does, but Bear is still nice.
I pay for Bear because it’s a native app and not in the weird uncanny valley of Electron apps that almost feel native until you hit the rough edges. It syncs with iCloud. It supports Shortcuts. It’s as responsive to keystrokes and keyboard shortcuts as any other Mac app. Basically, it just feels good to me and I enjoy using it.
Obsidian’s awesome. It’s also an ADHD tarpit for me. I can way too easily get distracted into optimizing my workflow instead of, you know, just typing notes into it. That’s a me problem, not a them problem. I don’t mean it as a criticism against Obsidian. It’s just not the right tool for me.
Images appear as thumbnails in the notes-list.
Minimal tags-first organization, rather than Obsidians poorly thought out mix of files and tags.
...and that's it. It's the only app that has never given me any reason to switch in ~10 years.