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- Hacker News
- I believe that not only you should own your data in plain files, but also you should own the software that opens those files.
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.
by zakirullin - Or just use LogSeq https://discuss.logseq.com/t/whats-new-with-logseq-db-may-16...by dodyg
- It’s interesting to me that it says that in some versions of second brain:
“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.
by Ifkaluva - I use .MD files, helix terminal editor with a markdown LSP called markdown-oxide that replicates the obsidian feature set (like bidirectional links, tags, making new notes automatically, two keys get you from a in-line footnote to the definition and back again, etc), and rumdl which is a super efficient and customizable markdown linter and formatter (semantic line breaks far the win!) . Since it is all helix I can jump around a huge web of interlinked files very quickly with only a few key presses, as well as inside a document and manipulate them en masse or in minute detail all with only a few taps. All of your standard open source terminal tools work with it, difftastic, bat/cat, zoxide/CD, ripgrep, fzf, git, LLMs, encryption, sync, etc etc. I use yazi for a visual filepicker and zellij for tabs. Run it on a server and connect from any computer in the world without downloading a single thing. I sometimes make use of two tools called rucola and tree-md for looking at prettier versions of the texts and seeing stats about how they interact. All open source of course!
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.
- Joplin is open source, syncing setup between devices is one login to Dropbox, works for free, with native apps on Windows/OSX/Linux/iOS/Android. It has a bunch of plugins too. If you just need markdown files with syncing, use it rather than paying for Obsidian sync.
The 2GB free quota on Dropbox is plenty enough for text (and some screenshots). Or you could self-host obviously. Git while lovely for source code is a hassle for notes.
by tsurba - I wouldn't show it as an alternative to Obsidian though. It shares MD files with it and both are supposedly about note taking ("supposedly" is for Obsidian, I haven't tried Files.md yet), but Files.md seems to have its own way of making the users work with their thoughts, notes and knowledge altogether.
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!
by ocimbote - AI'm building a native version[0] of Obsidian in Qt6 (QWidgets, cpp), replicating the markdown editor takes a while, there are so many ways of corrupting the file or losing the rendered markdown style... but its getting there[1] and its lightweight, using about 15mb ram, no gpu and barely uses any cpu when the cursor or scroll moves, like a text editor should be.
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
by UnnoTed - This made me realize that obsidian is *not* opensource, but in a way obsidian made me feel like it was opensource. Obviously now that I researched it, it is quite obvious that it is not, but still it 'feels' like it should be opensource.by himata4113