Also Zettlr
Love Tiddlywiki. It's amazing the amount of functionality it has, even if you use it in "one html file" mode. Great for making a web garden [1].
- self hosted
- works offline (mostly)
- "just md" BUT
- scriptable or extendable by lua, rendered in page, eg `${1 + 1}` outputs `2`, but you can do a lot more, such as query pages and tags with a LINQ type query interface.
I tried moving to Obsidian Notes and found myself missing Trillium. It's nice to be able to just open the web browser and have access to your own self-hosted notes with an editor anywhere. You also can set it up so if you add a sharing tag to a note you can easily share a link to the note. I believe Obsidian allows similar but only if you pay, and it's also not self-hosted.
I've tried a wiki style approach before like Tiddlywiki, but I feel like it is a whole different concept of taking and making notes that often is a bit more cumbersome, but maybe it works better with how some people think.
People use chatbot on the mobiles - way more convenient.
You can both read/write notes through the chat.
So that your files and tools can grow together, fully under your ownership, through the ages.
The app can be easily tweaked for your own needs via an LLM - code is optimized for that.
P.S. And Golang seems to be great fit for this kind of software.
docker + php-fpm + php7 + larvel + nginx + redis + cron + worker + certbot
Server after the rewrite to Golang:
server, a 15MB no-dependencies binary that has everything.
Like, I should be able to open it even after a few years, and do some fixes or add some features.
Go's ecosystem seems to share this mindset.
I believe I put too much time into it during all those years, but I don't regret it. Because I use the project on daily basis.
It seems like software in AI-era should be distributed open source.
So that anyone could tweak it however he wants. Not though clunky plugins system.
For the first time, I put a sponsorship button. Will see if it works.
The subscription based platform with automatic cloud hosting and other quality of life features, whatever those are depending on the app.
Although there's a bunch of 100% open source projects and developers that get enough donations to make it their full time job just off of that. Not that it's the way to go if you want to get rich, but it's still very much a real thing.
In my experience, if the dev wishes to be compensated in dollars, they also sell a commercial license, cloud services, etc.
I have a problem, I spend a few days building a tool that solves the problem, it works pretty well for me, and I release it to let others get value from it. They make tweaks to it, perhaps improve it, and I get value from those enhancements and bugfixes.
They have lots of sponsors [1]; you can pay $4/month for sync service or $50 a year, per person for a commercial license.
Free as in beer and free as in speech means those ‘contributors’ are also free as in Linus to go fork themselves.
Don’t like it? Go fork, yourself. Want it different? Pay, money, make, it, happen. Don’t like paying? Go fork, yourself, harder.
I'm not saying you have to, but you asked how they get compensated and there's nothing stopping you from giving them money.
It's easy to forget that you get a lot of value out of something and not give back. If you end up getting a good paying job with your programming experience just buy your favorite projects "a beer" one a month, or once a year. God knows it's better spent there all the subscriptions we have like Netflix or Spotify. Cheaper too.
Also, if the projects are big enough you can usually get tax credit. If you work at a decently sized company they also usually do some charity matching.
Simple utility stuff I believe should fit in this category. Things like a text editor.
The profit comes from elsewhere, larger more complex systems.
Of course someone can TRY to profit off a text editor, but unless it solves complex enough problems (like a full blown IDE, but even then...).
The issue is there is intense demand for it, and ALSO easy supply. If someone attempts a profit driving rugpull, another will pop up in it's place.
I am still using Dendron because it meets my needs, but I'm always half tempted to replace it, and I'm fairly confident I could come up with something that meets my own needs in a day or two, and it would likely also be valuable to countless others. I just keep assuming that someone else will spend that day or two, and my pain points with Dendron are not that bad for me to spend the time.
Most text-editors by large corporations don't even pass this bar.
I do think there is room for a few good paid text editors in the world, but most people won't pay directly for them, though they might use them if they are bundled ala Google Docs / O365 Word.
I also paid for a few more, e.g. Notion, but I think it's better to focus on: There's definitely value in good text editors.
They can greatly enhance your experience with a system, e.g. if Samsung Notes was amazing I'd be much more likely to stick to using a Samsung phone.
That makes it easy for AI to be trained on it.
That's the point of open source, sharing the knowledge.
We'll all make the same shit over and over if noone shares.
But if we all share, then the only thing left to make is the unknown.
That was true before the "AI era" as well.
Just now, any regular user can clone the repository and ask an LLM to tune it to his needs.
That's why I will always hammer on open standards and federation.
Might as well open-source it (and perhaps get more people helping with the development), keep the Sync service, and stem competitor projects like these in the bud.
But in any case, this is also a nice project, but I guess I'm also an Obsidian evangelist.
Please explain to me why developers should act like monks who've taken a vow of poverty? The devs built something valuable, they should profit from it.
Agreed, but in the case of Obsidian, since the way they manage the data, they cannot just "take it away from us", it'll always sit where you leave it, as it's not a SaaS or a remote service. And even if the desktop client went away, all your data and notes are still available.
Otherwise I generally agree with you, all my professional and personal tooling shouldn't be able to take away agency from me, but it's worth separate the tooling from the data, as loosing the tooling sucks but loosing the data is a lot worse, at least they cannot do that.
Perception of quality, because the author is under constant review.
AFAIK (as a long-term Obsidian daily user) Obsidian makes their money on various things attached to the editor/viewer itself, but don't actually charge for the editor/viewer. Even if they did, they could still slap a FOSS license on it, and continue charging for the parts they charge for today.
I'm guessing it's something else they're worried about though, rather than those things.
I agree with your very last part though, but I don't agree you cannot make it open source at the same time.
There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).
I think exactly the same as you, but that doesn't give me the myopic view of "either you do open source or you get rich"
> There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).
You know this because you spent a whole of two minutes thinking about it?
It'd make a different bet, that Obsidian is popular today, but if they went FOSS, they'd become ubiquitous. Probably some copy-pasted competitors would appear as quickly as they'd disappear, because they're not Team Obsidian, and obviously don't know as much as Obsidian does.
But anyways, this is all speculation, I don't know for sure what would happen either, but at least I'm humble enough to know I don't know.
I don't think they are mixing the two. If they open sourced it, there would be immediate competition. Anyone could fork it and circumvent/compete with any premium features they might want to add to it in the future.
It's very hard to use this model to actually build a profitable company.
The only open source projects that can actually sustain themselves financially get handouts from large corporations (or are eventually purchased by them).
As for their other paid service, Obsidian Publish, since all Obsidian notes are in plain markdown there are already many free alternatives.
So open sourcing would not harm any of those income streams. It's not about Obsidian losing profit. If you want to read the actual reasons they have decided not to open source Obsidian, they have talked about it on their forums[2]
[1] https://obsidian.md/help/sync-notes [2] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...
No consideration given that lots of people contribute voluntarily to open-source projects or even release their projects/code for free because they enjoy writing code and engaging with the broader open source or free software community.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181203 btw
No, don't bully others into a fake argument about your weird fantasies.
They never said that developers should be poor. That's also incorrect. Please don't pull others into this kind of toxic discussions.
I'd like to hereby propose the "open shell" development model.
When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility. But what I found out was entirely different and much more interesting.
I'll give it a try, thanks for sharing your year-old work!
When I read “alternative” I immediately had a rant in my head about people calling things alternatives that are not.
Thanks for a good observation! Indeed, I don't position it as Obsidian alternative. I don't know a better pitch for it just yet.
For me that's something about: simplicity, lazy flow of adding things, readiness to use out of the box.
To focus on what works, and not what is fancy.
"TextBundle brings convenience back - by bundling the Markdown text and all referenced images into a single file."
We had those already more than a decade ago. Personally, I fondly remember Mou.
Obsidian has heavy Electron vibes, and Files.md is several steps more into the wrong direction.
The name is also bad. It feels like it was chosen because someone already had the domain.
I only really struggle with one basic feature - I want to be able to write note within 1-2 seconds of clicking the app icon. Obsidian makes it 10-15 seconds at best. The HelixNotes sometimes can get this in under 10, still looking for better options.
There is no better interface for text than a terminal, and we are in the golden age. Despite being extremely powerful, this setup will run on resource constrained machines.
It's a personal choice that cannot be imposed on everyone. Not everyone is a developer.
I've ended up still sticking with Trilium however as I like being able to have notes in multiple locations like this.
Check out Tolaria [1]. Open source, works locally, uses markdown, no-databases. Git client built-in. Even has Notion-style input.
[1]: https://tolaria.md
Simplicity started from the domain name.
I have been building a slightly different solution to the same problem. So far I’m pretty happy with the results and I have enough returning users that I think others are too (https://sdocs.dev/analytics).
I’ve built SmallDocs (https://sdocs.dev; Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).
SDocs is cli (`sdoc file.md`) -> instantly rendered Markdown file in the browser
When you install the cli it gives you the option to add a note in your base agent file (`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`, etc.). This means every agent chat knows about SDocs and you can say “sdoc me the plan when you’re done with it” and the file will pop open instead of you having to find that terminal session to know it’s done.
Going browser first means you’re not required to install anything to get a great experience.
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain entirely local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):
https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...
The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").
The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.
This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.
I've enjoyed exploiting the HTML rendering side of things which is possible by displaying Markdown in a browser. I’ve added tagged code blocks that the agent is given documentation on how to use. Eg ```chart or ```mermaid (for mermaid diagrams). These then become interactive elements on the page (mermaid is best example of this currently). See live renderings of these options here - charts gallery: https://sdocs.dev/s/yO3WbxFf#k=arcDBnizla5n437VFAeiQcwlu8kh_..., diagrams gallery: https://sdocs.dev/s/B_Ux11DV#k=KsvheEkiBFai6acnoIJnrOdfVRS5u...
Thanks! I bought it about 3 years ago. Back then, the project was just a chatbot.
But already back then, I kind of had an idea where I want it all to go.
I wanted the simplicity (and 0 cognitive load!) to start right from the domain name! Files in .md - files.md!
> Re storing things on your server, what is the security layer around that?
For the most part I use the project from my Telegram bot. And due to that, it is not possible to do proper E2E.
Will see if people use the chatbot, if not, we can consider E2E.
> I'm gonna try Files.md for some inspiration on what I could be missing
For the most part I was thinking more about what I can remove :D
This inspires me. What kind of minimal feature set does one need to improve his thinking...
Just open web/index.html file, it absolutely requires no server.
If you want a local server though, it is easy to setup: https://github.com/zakirullin/files.md/blob/main/docs/your-o...
Not going to be open source or free though, with 2 year perpetual license. I wonder how much that would interest you? My target is people who wants todo.txt like simplicity, but few useful bits. Only for Linux and Windows for now.
Interesting. Productivity tools should not force me getting creative to do the simplest things. Ideally, I can make it adapt to my workflow, not the other way around.
That line above is just an attempt to convince the user that the lack of features/extensibility is a positive thing.
But Local File System API has limited support in other browsers.
or just vibe your own solution :)
"What a great use of my time building a competitor that adds no value, just to save a few dollars a month on sync and publishing. I hope other people value their time as little as I do and contribute"
Have fun!
I do not know what to do with my pet project. I'm using it myself, and it has tons of futures that took quite some effort to get right. For example, WYSIWYG table editing is not trivial, and Claude Opus agrees with me, in the sense that it could not manage it (at all) by itself.
Open-sourcing it is an option, but I don't look forward to negative feedback. If anyone else wants Emacs keybindings in Obsidian, I will change my mind :)
Still need to render widget tables, lists and syntax highlighting for code blocks for a basic modern notepad, i'm not sure about open sourcing it, seems like a waste of time nowadays but it'll be free to use.
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/ro9Zq9w.png [1]: https://i.imgur.com/pbJcTQF.gif
If you're building something that's Free software, fully compatible with Obsidian, and a native app, AI'm willing to contribute tokens.
This is hand crafted, for the most part.
While OSS is nice, in theory it allows vibe-coding personalizations, without a clear plugin standard then every update would cause a merge headache.
And there is no lack of text editors.
The first real Obsidian alternative would allow use of existing Obsidian plugins. And I think this one thing could really make an alternative gain traction, with both users and those who contribute to the plugin ecosystem.
“Second brain grows, but first brain doesn’t get smarter.”
Something I remember Tiago Forte said, which turned me off of his partículas brand of a second brain, is that his goal is to “remember nothing”, and have the second brain surface exactly the context necessary at the moment, which he would proceed to read and ingest.
That sounds terrible to me :) it’s like “we don’t need to remember things if we can google them”.
I much prefer this author’s vision of using the second brain to strengthen the first brain.
I've been growing my knowledge base for many years, with great results.
And you really need all that much to start taking notes.
No techniques, no workflows, just the the simplest setup would do.
"Second Brain", however, brings excitement to people's minds.
But in reality it just doesn't work. It makes great sales, though.
But we also can't remember nothing and just dump _everything_ into the second brain, otherwise we'd have no map, no context, no way to even know how to look for what we need in the moment. It would be like taking a random teenager off the street, handing them an electronics engineering textbook, and asking them to build a power supply on the spot.
So there is definitely a spectrum. Everyone seems to disagree on the optimal point on the spectrum and that is almost certainly because it varies greatly from person to person.
My personal experience has been that simply writing extremely detailed notes in the first place makes the information "sticky" in my brain, and greatly increases the likelihood that I won't even _need_ to directly reference the notes in the future. Fun little catch-22 there.
My take: you probably don't need so much metadata!
I've spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out the perfect knowledge management app for me and honestly, I'm pretty sure I will get a lot of mileage out of something you just throw pages into, search to find it again, and ask AI to summarize/consolidate when you need it again.
I find the best thing to do when studying something is to go over your material, internalize and synthesize it in an essay. If you can't create an original essay which perfectly replicates the knowledge you want to understand then you almost certainly don't understand it perfectly.
Alternatively, create a detailed flow chart using subcharts if you have to. (Graphviz/dot is good for this)
Not to take away from files.md - as the product looks and feels stellar - we have been trying to build a markdown editor for years as well, with more focus on collaborative features and rich customization and styling: https://kraa.io/about
Local models will continue to improve, if your concern is privacy -- already they do a decent enough job at interacting with a well-schema'd PKM
krthr•3h ago
zakirullin•3h ago
dewey•3h ago
zakirullin•2h ago
A lot of us built knowledge bases, and we enjoyed it all quite a bit.
snjnlsn•2h ago
zakirullin•56m ago
I can't live without it :)
Notes, journal, tasks, projects - everything is in there.
Whenever I have a new machine, first thing I do - I open the app =)
zakirullin•56m ago
jonotime•2h ago
ctippett•40m ago
A few years ago I played around with copying the Bear app interface for the web, the idea was to create a visually identical mockup of the app so you could immediately visualise changes made when customising various theme values. I stalled with the implementation of the last part, but the rest of it is up at bear.christippett.dev
[1] https://bear.app