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GitLab team member here, thanks for sharing! I'm using the Web IDE to take notes in most of my projects, work and personal, and publish the notes with MkDocs and GitLab Pages to a searchable frontend/domain when needed. Editing also happens in Gitpod with live preview in the browser. You can find all resources for o11y.love [0] and opsindev.news [1] in the GitLab projects, including .gitpod.yml configuration, mkdocs.yml setup, .gitlab-ci.yml deployments. I have been writing lots of documentation in my past OSS projects, so I am used to Markdown as markup language, taking notes very fast. Learning Markdown requires some practice, and can be helped within Gitpod and the VS Code extensions, if the default preview is not sufficient. [2] [3] You can also sync the notes repository offline into VS Code as desktop IDE for example. Using Obsidian.md to take notes and publish with GitLab pages [4] looks promising too; I have not tried it yet. [0] https://gitlab.com/everyonecancontribute/observability/o11y.... [1] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/opsindev.news [2] https://www.gitpod.io/docs/ides-and-editors/vscode-extension... [3] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/markdown [4] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/15/publishing-obsidian...
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could it be your local environment blocking the .news TLD, and giving you a redirect? (for example, Cisco Umbrella (formerly OpenDNS Umbrella))
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I've tried all kinds of things and even just a couple weeks ago tried out some other tools, but none of them beat simple text files. I push to Gitlab and I can view the notes on my phone. Editing is a bit of a pain, but since it's not often that I edit notes on the phone, I accept it. For me, managing tasks in text files is the hard part. Recently I added snippets to VSCode to easily tag my tasks and set due dates (the snippets just add searchable identifiers at the end of the line). Greping these identifiers is easy, however for due dates I will need a quick script to pick up all the tasks and order them. Shouldn't be too hard and can even be in a Gitlab CI pipeline to automatically re-order the list on every push. Re-reading my comment, it reminds me of the legendary "Dropbox is just FTP" comment :D.
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So, there's "todo.txt-cli"† that can help manage todo files in a more task-orientated fashion, while still just using text files. As a bonus, it got something of a cult following a few years back, and there are apps for both mobile platforms which can interact with them too (even out of dropbox, iirc). † https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli
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Your implementation/idea looks interesting, but I am looking in different direction. I do not want web based. I am often in areas where I do not have network access. I do not want to deal with security breaches, vulnerabilities, down times. I do not want to type things. I am looking for a tool that will take voice recording and convert it to text on my desktops and and most importantly my (Android) mobile devices. I have been using text files in markdown and raw text before that, for decades. They are searchable, quick and accessible across multiple platforms. Yet, I still use my dictaphone[0]. It requires pressing a single button, it records my voice, time stamps it, and files it. I am looking for a solution where the app behaves as a dictaphone, and voice-to-text is performed, and the files are local if I want them to be. Make something like that and I am willing to drop coins. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_machine
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Dragon speech? Has integrations like Evernote. I know that's online but they have apps too.
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I’ve been planning to build this for mac/ios/ipad and have researched/used the foundations - let me know if I can reach out if you are interested in testing or giving feedback, unfortunately Android isn’t a priority as I’m solo indie and favor native
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None of my note taking is amazing but I'm quite happy with the state of it. Most of my personal notes end up in Google Keep as that has a bunch of nifty sharing/reminder/etc. features built in. At work I take all my notes in a "diary.md" markdown file in a pinned VSCode tab. I started taking bullet-pointed daily notes to help remind myself about what happened the previous day to make standup meetings easier... it has helped tremendously past that too though, as I now habitually take notes for meetings and other goings-on as well. To start, the basic process was: 1. Set up a diary.md file in its own folder, open it in my main VSCode window, and pin the tab 2. Set up a VSCode Markdown snippet for "td" (for 'today') -> generates requisite headings, with the current day's date and the first bullet point for note-taking 3. Set up personal private git repository in the diary folder so that my notes don't die if my laptop does 4. Set up bash alias "gpn" (for 'git push notes') -> auto commit my notes with some "automated macro commit" message and push to remote 5. Each year I start fresh and rename the old diary.md file by adding the year number to it and filing it away in the repo/archive folder. If I'm working on a bigger project I'll set up a separate Markdown file in the same repo and make project-specific notes in there, while keeping the standup bullet points in diary.md - otherwise for message drafts or more general meetings notes I just add them under subheadings inside the day's "diary entry".
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Nice! We tried using the Wiki of a gitlab project in my company to gather some knowledge in a single place, but it was too "hard" to go to a page and edit it. So we moved the content in the repo. Again, we had to search if our content was already written or not, and we were spending time trying to find files and words instead of writing shorts texts. So we moved our content on the gitlab issues of the repo. Issues have the same markdown support, we can use ctrl+v to insert screenshots, we can add tags to the issues, we can assign people to relevant issues, we can comment with new things to do/add, and we can use the search bar to find relevant content. All our "knowledge doc" is stored insides the issues of an empty project named "doc". We were just thinking about something to replace an older system not used anymore, and since it's been 2 years I think I can say that issues really work well for us (small team, 6 devs, some of us write more issues than others). For personal notes I did what every dev do when they think about a problem ("Why not make my ideal tool myself?"), and I created n.py, a very small Python program that's used to take incremental notes using any program (I used sublime text, nano and now I'm learning vim through it), search in the notes content and display them (repo here: https://git.bitmycode.com/sodimel/n).
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GitLab team member here, thanks for sharing your experience! The UX with editing the wiki, using WYSIWYG content editor [0] has been improved in recent releases. [1] I peeked into 15.2 (self-managed release coming on Friday, July 22) which brings rendering Mermaid, PlantUML, Kroki diagrams previews. [2] Maybe the wiki can be worth to revisit in the future, there are more features underway, suggest diving into this epic [3] > Issues have the same markdown support, we can use ctrl+v to insert screenshots, we can add tags to the issues, we can assign people to relevant issues, we can comment with new things to do/add, and we can use the search bar to find relevant content. All our "knowledge doc" is stored insides the issues of an empty project named "doc". Great to see that you have found a workflow, and use issues to keep things documented and organized. Maybe a suggestion for creating an entry point into the dcc project: Use GitLab CI/CD to read the issues from the REST API, group by label, and render a Markdown README.md file which gets pushed to the repository automatically. That way the "index" is generated and provides greater visibility into the documentation issues. I like API challenges, so I've hacked [4] a small script [5] using python-gitlab to better illustrate what I mean :-) Uses issues [6] with labels to generate an index.md [7] (can also be README.md for example). Feel free to repurpose for your own needs, if that helps. The missing step is to automate it using GitLab CI/CD Schedules, but that's documented. [0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/wiki/#content-editor [1] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/05/22/gitlab-15-0-rel... [2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/86701 [3] https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5401 [4] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/api-playground/-/merge_requests/... [5] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/api-playground/-/tree/main/pytho... [6] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/api-playground/-/issues [7] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/api-playground/-/blob/main/index...
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Recently I've been using joplin [0] has mobile and desktop apps and uses a number of cloud storage to sync. [0] https://joplinapp.org/
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I tried wholeheartedly to migrate to using Joplin from apple notes so I could use a native client on more platforms than my phone + laptop, but it was frustrating in so many ways. S3 storage syncing frequently broke on the iOS app, simple auto-formatting insidiously defied my expectations, and it was very difficult to keep things organized without very explicitly labeling my notes (which I don't have to do with Apple notes, as you can see a preview of the text contained inside of the note). I'd love to revisit joplin in a few years when I have more time to tinker or contribute to the project, though.
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Syncing in joplin is a pain. It brokes everytime.
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I've not encountered this at all so far, syncing between my Linux desktop, android via Dropbox as always worked.
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Seconding this; I switched to Obsidian from Notion and I've been liking it. I also use a plugin called Wielder for it that lets me write codeblocks in my notes and turns my note taking system into a literate programming environment. So I have for example a self-written plugin that applies transformations to existing pages to incorporate the sort of question templates suggested in books like How To Solve It or on websites like untools. I also have certain data structures built into the note environment - stuff like asynchronous task management. Since everything is markdown everything just defaults to working when these higher level tools aren't active because I'm in a no code environment. What I'm not so certain on is if this is actually helping me think better enough to be worth the cost in time of getting fancy. This is an example of a blog post written basically by stringing together notes from walking a path through the graph of my notes: - https://joshuacol.es/2021/05/17/virtuous-cycles.html These are two I wrote before adopting the methodology which I feel a bit happier with because I feel like I learned more in the process of researching them and writing them: - https://joshuacol.es/2020/03/06/modeling-technical-income.ht... - https://joshuacol.es/2019/04/23/hypothesis.html
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Off-topic maybe, but I'm the author of Obsidian Wielder ( https://wielder.victor.earth), so it's great to hear that people in the wild are finding it useful! If you have any sort of feedback how it can help you more, please do let me know! I'm sure a lot of other Obsidian users here on HN would find Wielder useful as well, but the Show HN I made a while ago didn't get much traction (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31846474), maybe I'll retry once I've added some more features :)
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Amazing work and thank you so much for making something so cool. With regard to feedback. - Some features I'm interested in are being able to install libraries or a recommended path for getting access to libraries via RPC to a less limited runtime. For example, lets say I want to use the hugginfaces API to do text extraction within my note. Clojure has some great tools for running arbitrary Python code from within it, but how can I leverage that code from within Weilder. - Is there planned support for importing from a namespace in another note? My current workflows are everything goes into one note and then I just hide the sections with the code so they don't distract but sometimes there are pages worth of code. I expect over time I'll find a lot of things that have common implementations.
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I'm interested in this bit: > ...lets me write codeblocks in my notes and turns my note taking system into a literate programming environment. So I have for example a self-written plugin that applies transformations to existing pages to incorporate the sort of question templates suggested in books like How To Solve It or on websites like untools. Do you have any posts or additional information on this in particular?
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Snap & Sketch is my core workflow (it's by far the fastest way to get information from meat space into notes), and the best app I've found so far to facilitate this is GoodNotes. It has three critical features: 1. Native snap & sketch support (no fussing with embedding every time you want to create/edit, which is all the time for me) 2. Stores notes as folders-of-PDF in dropbox, not proprietary format locked behind a subscription. 3. Fast OCR search (I'd happily swap this for good native text editing, but having some smooth search mechanism is very important and many graphical apps don't.) GoodNotes has plenty of weaknesses -- the drawing tools are primitive, the desktop text editing story is almost nonexistent, it's tied to the mac ecosystem -- so I have been delighted to see the explosion of good Markdown tooling which is strong in these other areas, and I have been hoping that one of them would be good enough at snap & sketch that I could jump. Obsidian.md+excalidraw comes dangerously close to challenging GoodNotes, but my brief trial on an iPad involved too much fussing around to make the snap & sketch workflow happen, so I don't think I'll jump quite yet. Just including my thoughts for anyone else out there approaching notes from the Snap & Sketch angle.
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What is Snap & Sketch? Google's turning up nothing
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Taking a picture and drawing on it. Yeah, I should have clarified that it wasn't a proper noun.
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I've switched from Obsidian to Joplin, which is a nicer looking FOSS alternative.
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Last time I checked, Joplin stores a bunch of metadata in databases and such, is that still true? I'm still using Obsidian after some years, mainly because it's just a directory of Markdown files (and some JSON configuration in the .obsidian directory), but also for the plugin ecosystem. Would it be hard to use terminal git to sync my Joplin database manually?
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>To publish my notes, I use PineDocs [3] which generates a very nice website This is music to my ears(eyes?)! And, something I've been searching for my obsidian vault. I'm not a developer, could you expand just a bit about your PineDocs workflow for Obsidian? Especially: does it handle note-to-note links and transclusions?
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If you want to publish a website directly from Obsidian + support the Obsidian developers monthly (), you can give Obsidian Publish ( https://obsidian.md/publish) a try. I use it for my notes and as a demonstration website for one of my projects, works well enough for those use cases.
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I can totally appreciate that. That pricing for Publish is way out of whack for my goals. My particular vault se case might only update once or twice a month (it's all already written), so nearly $200 a year for something so static just doesn't make sense.
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I am also very satisfied of Obsidian. Do you use excalidraw with a tablet or graphic tablet, or with your mouse? I have been exploring ways of taking manuscript notes.
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I've been really enjoying Obsidian. I think of it as VSCode but for Markdown, with an extension marketplace more for notes than code. Turning markdown into an interactive kanban is especially powerful, and more extensions are being added all the time. I am going to check out Joplin soon, though. Obsidian could be a little friendlier and come with a couple more batteries for someone like me.
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For my knowledge base, I use VS Code with Markdown Memo, which supports back links and easy link creation. Free. Ultimately it’s all just a bunch of Markdown files with mermaid diagrams and LaTeX equations. It’s so simple.
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I do this for a knowledge-base in our lab (especially for our server infrastructure). Only difference is that I just edit in VSCodium. It's pretty great, I can send a github URL to someone and if its a private repo, its both a "private"[0] and practical way to share information. I will say I do something similar on my personal KB at noteaureus.org except I also run it through Hugo. The GitHub method is a bit nicer for including collaborators that aren't familiar with Hugo, but I do like using Hugo over GitHub for two reasons: 1) You can tag posts 2) You aren't beholden to the whims of Microsoft (or anyone for that matter) The main drawback I can think of is that it's kinda baroque to make things password protected on Hugo in a meaningful way. [0] For certain definitions of private.
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What does Step 3 mean here? What is meant by "..."? Are you talking about the Explorer menu in Github? Or the dotfile package manager (ellipsis)?
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I have tried so many of these and ended up landing on the free version of Notion. I like the multi-device support and the nested content idea. The desktop app is stable and the web one is performant as well.
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Notion has replaced all my note taking apps, bookmarking apps, idea dump apps etc A single source of truth for me.
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I've become more and more fond of Notion over the last few months. The composition of "blocks" is very nice, and even things like how indentation is done makes a huge difference in taking notes. I can manage meal planning, grocery lists, todos, essay drafts, and software projects all in one tool. It's also very easy to interlink things and make notes as verbose or minimal as you like from page to page. I can define an item in my weekly todos but then link to a project page that's part of a kanban board that has more context. Overall the UX just feels really elegant compared to everything else I've tried to use.
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One downside to a Git repo is that it doesn't have an easy-to-use mobile app like Google Keep or Apple Notes.
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Working Copy works as a mobile app interface to a git repo, including edits to files in Markdown (for some approximation of easy-to-use).
Pushing changes to remotes does require purchase.
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THIS. To me the the most important thing about note taking is clicking a button and immediately being able to write something, either pc or phone. I use google keep because it's the most straight forward way for me and it is synced. I would love a replacement (because it's so limited, and don't like the desktop client...), but it needs to be as convenient.
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Totally agree, and to date my workaround is that my default view for the repo is the initial README.md in edit mode ... I drop stuff that's top of mind or urgent and then afterwards (or later) move to a different file if needed.
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This is one of the big reasons to use Obsidian (or similar). You still get markdown files on disk, and you can even still put it in a git repo if you really want. But you also get decent desktop/mobile apps with higher-level organization tools on top.
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Absolutely yes. Obsidian is might as well have been called "MarkdownOS" it's so powerful, flexible, extensible, etc. Amazing plugins like dataview and Excalidraw, and a world-class editing experience (hotkey-togglable WYSIWYG mode) etc... it's become the heart and hub of my system and I recommend it without reservation.
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This is my comfort zone: Todo = plain text. sublime/keep/applenotes/pen+paper/whiteboard/ Work notes = outlook drafts. Personal notes = google docs. Some plain text conventions I use. [ ] a todo
[x] done task. I delete it after couple weeks.
[ ] another task __some extra notes. Anything with double underscores means WIP. I just search for it and continue from there
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have you tried GitJournal? it works great for me, handles most note taking styles
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Yeah, web IDEs have made life a lot easier but I don't think the experience works well for a minimal note taking flow. one of the most important things for me when it comes to a note-taking app is to be able to write free form and without the need for too much process - obviously this is not quite possible in markdown or really most digital formats, but also just the fact that I know git is backing my notes store creates a maintenance burden in my mind that I'm not sure I care for. I used to use jupyter notebooks way back when which felt more flexible but even that began to feel too heavy a process. Do you use git at all in terms of committing notes and looking through history, or are you only ever adding on top and treating a commit like a save in a notepad app? This is a bit peripheral but I've been considering investing in a remarkable tablet, but using it obviously requires me to carry an additional physical device around.
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So for both use cases (Gitlab & Github) their web IDEs are leveraging Git (from the web GUI). So the cool aspect of all of this is that I could clone the repo locally and maybe even re-purpose for a Hugo site. But the core benefit of version control is there.
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Do you think this could be useful in a classroom environment? Maybe shared notes for students and/or groups? My personal workflow is Plain Text files (often markdown) in a Notes folder on Dropbox. nvAlt on my main machine to quickly search, edit, and create notes. A shortcut in terminal that cd's me into the directory, rg for cli search, and Editorial for mobile access. I have thousands of notes and have only had a few sync issues over the years.
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I use vimwiki this way. I changed the landing page name to `README.md` and used markdown files so I can always see it rendered beautifully on Github.
I have another vim extension that automatically commits and pushes the changes.
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this. I have used some many note taking app before emacs - from simplenotes, to joplin, and many other on Mac, Windows and linux, I cannot list them all, but since I have understood how to build a workflow around emacs, I have finally something I can stick to and which work. Having a tool that can adapt to an inevitably changing worklflow has been really a game changer for my capacity to take notes, log my days, and write in general.
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100%. Org-mode is markdown on steroids and already supports everything these markdown note-takers do plus more. The only reason people keep reinventing the wheel is because they don't want to use emacs.
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Just putting this here: I am using denote nowadays after org-roam and while it's not org-roam (I miss the dailies) it gets some stuff really right (tags, directories)
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Today I had a demo of zenkit hypernotes, it is kind of intelligence-driven, but the usefulness of some features (blocks?) seem unclear to me
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Can someone recommend a note taking app that will stay at the front of the screen. I sometimes record voiceovers in final cut, and want to read back my notes. I simultaneously want to have both final cut in full screen and the note app up front. Stupid thing goes into the background as soon as I click on final cut. Stickies do the same. I also want to be able to set the font size of my notes, and would prefer the app would just give me plain text and not try to format html when I copy something from the browser into it.
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I, too, have been digging Obsidian
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Which GitHub alternatives have something similar to GitHub pages?
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I use GitJournal app. And Obsidian for PC.
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Any reason you prefer GitJournal to the Obsidian app?
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Great tip, this works better than onenote.
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Yes...it's a git repository with VSCode attached, which you can do locally as well. Arguably, this is better with a local copy of VSCode rather than the web editor, which is missing features in comparison. As a bonus you can choose any git provider you'd like.
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I basically do this with Dropbox, Emacs, and git, but just for shared 'personal' note taking/journaling amongst multiple devices.
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Lol. So adorable. Private repos weren't always free. And make sure you don't accidentally ever make it private, you would be surprised what credentials you might have accidentally put in it's got history. And then you have log in to a second github account if your company forces github tied to a company email. No such thing as a free lunch.
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