If someone wonders why old Firefox users, while still preferring new Firefox to anything else, is still annoyed then this might be a perfect example to explain it:
There used to be a number of extensions of this type on old Firefox. I cannot remember exactly this one, but here are a couple to prove what was possible [1]:
- the original Firebug which became developer tools and was cloned to every other browser was just another Firefox extension(!)
- an extension I used a lot was Scrapbook, which let me crawl and store websites (I used it for symfony docs back in 2007-2009 before mobile broadband was available or at least not within reach for me. It would download pages recursively according to simple, useful rules like maxrecursion, only subdirectories and only a certain domain and then rewrite every url on the page to be relative instead of absolute. You could also edit the pages locally.)
- Alerts (or something similar) would check web pages according to simple rules I set up and notify me if it saw significant changes.
[1]: somebody will probably tell that it existed too and was even better, I just didn't know of it.
But it's interesting that Nyxt is planning to to have WebExtensions in addition to their own extension system. Feels like the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that maybe didn't occur to Mozilla back then (but I don't know the history). The unspoken presumption that it had to be just one system.
Since a while, I have a no-app principle for any note taking or knowledge organization. Where _app_ is anything not directly provided by file systems or text-files (e.g. .md, .txt). After countless of deprecated app experiences in the last 20 years, I am happy to have switched to a more solid base, so the knowledge I produce is not lost when switching OSs, app versions, formats etc.
Seeing the functions of Nyxt, they look exciting and perhaps I will try this for short-term knowledge (e.g. brainstorming on a topic, where I won't need to access this knowledge again after e.g. one year). For everything else I will stick to nested folders and markdown files, where compatibility is almost guaranteed.
Apart from the fact that I include Apple Notes in this... yeah.
(Mostly because it is suitably ubiquitous -- it's an operating system feature for me.)
As I consider moving to a more low-budget dev environment again I do question whether I need to jump the remaining step to text files in some cloud storage. But I'd want immediate background sync (not having to wait for the note to arrive on a device or explicitly fetch it).
I’m the same. Fountain pen + notebook, and neovim + markdown. I think in markdown, now, and get annoyed when I have to compose (e.g. emails or whatever) in a crummy rich text editor.
I have an internal Nextcloud Server that I can access through VPN/Wireguard. The Nextcloud android client can edit files (either in plaintext, which I prefer, or markdown rendered mode). For when I have no mobile internet access, I use Markor [1], installed from F-Droid. The files in Markor are synched to Nextloud, when online or in home wifi again.
Excellent, excellent addition. This is so useful. For people who haven't tried another way: turns out nested folders inside more nested folders is a terrible way to organize your bookmarks!
I've been using the xBrowserSync extension to handle bookmarking across browsers; it also uses tags / descriptions + search for organization and recall. Its made a huge difference. But Nyxt now takes things even further; locally saving a copy of the page you're annotating. Great job!
> For people who haven't tried another way: turns out nested folders inside more nested folders is a terrible way to organize your bookmarks!
Depends on the person I think. My mind is intuitively comfortable with graph/tree structures. Despite having used Gmail since beta, I was never successful in leveraging the label/tag+search structure into something manageable. It was always chaos despite recurring attempts to tame it.
Having switched to self-hosted IMAP with the traditional directory approach, I feel in control of my e-mail for the first time in over a decade.
Similar experience with bookmarks.
Great that you found something that works for you but I think it's a mistake to believe it's possible or desirable to have one structure for everyone.
Had similar thoughts in this thread, where so many were arguing if "users love settings" or "users hate settings", and which settings are loved or hated. Stop assuming you can reduce every human into a single profile.
Let me know if you would be interested in developing a bit more to this nyxt browser feature to support persisting these extensions via the W3C Web Annotation protocol - https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/
I've been wanting to write an implementation of an annotation server, and it'd be cool to immediately interoperate with nyxt browser. Then I'd work on the same server supporting most other browsers (e.g. Firefox) via WebExtension API building on my old https://github.com/gobengo/web-annotation-extension
i wrote up a white paper a decade ago imagining a wikipedia like 9verlay on websites that would add a meta level of user interaction. just takes some advanced fingerprinting of the annotated content and some social media like subscription and blocking mechanism. it was called _wikilay_
I am currently building a similar tool to this called Conote (conote.page). Conote lets you highlight and annotate by simply pasting in a url instead of downloading a browser. You can therefore have discussions with others based on your annotations by sharing the link with them.
Conote is currently in early beta and there are a lot of rough edges eg. it currently only supports Chrome and Firefox desktop to create highlights (soon to be fixed). I have plans to add much better knowledge retrieval searches etc but for now am focusing on making the core ability to add context to your thoughts.
Yeah, I'm wondering in what way it's already easily possible to export those annotations to org. That would be amazing and a reason to finally give Nyxt a proper try.
If I take notes on something I read on the web, it goes into either my Obsidian offline notes or into the knowledge base on my website.
I assume that any given useful website may be gone in a month. This may be a holdover thought pattern from the 90s, but for me if it's worth knowing, it's worth writing down in my own system - which is app-independent, and could be printed from the source files without loss of information, should that become necessary.
Oh, and if the page author is here - please, reduce the resolution of that painting image. It's unnecessarily massive.
>Later, the tags will be useful because Nyxt also offers features related to information retrieval. Hence, the user can search or filter their highlight and comments.
It's not about Nyxt "entering Zettelkasten space", since it's philosophically not an island "app". It's a well designed tool with powerful interfaces to pass data into and out of the application.
For example, some power users already integrate Nyxt captures with org/org-roam, so it's "already" Zettelkasten friendly, in a sense. Whether the devs plan to branch towards that, I have no idea, but it should be already possible to integrate Nyxt with org-roam (maybe even some spiffy interfaces like the one demoed in OP).
It's kind of like how EMACS isn't a text editor, it's a platform for writing editor macros (Editor MACroS). Nyxt isn't a browser, it's a platform for writing browser macros ($CLEVER_ACRONYM).
I'd realy like this to work for me, but my memory isn't that good. So what ends up happening is I often can only remember paraphrases, or I can only remember the media type (e.g. video, blog post, repository)... I'd kill to have a system that allows you to just save content like that and then apply all sorts of such "soft" filters ("hints" or "guesses" instead of verbatim search).
> Retrieve the information based on some word I might remember
See, your memory is using some words as index to access stored information. And it's indexing it asap (well, some re-indexing probably happens when we sleep). Thus, I don't think an efficient digital memory extender can work without active human participation in indexing. Otherwise, it will produce a lot of garbage.
Clip to onenote, and onenote in general is a pretty amazing tool, it allows for everything I saw in the demo video, but has a interface that makes it much quicker to accomplish those task.
If you have access to the office 365 ecosystem, I would recommend checking it out (which that said, I strongly discourage the use of the native window10 version of oneNote, its a dumpster fire on wheels)
Something I've always wanted to work on was a browser extension that allowed things like this to happen collaboratively. There's stuff like PeerLibrary[0] that lets you annotate things as a group, but it's limited to publications and things you upload. Nyxt seems to meet what I want but lacks the collaborative aspect I'm looking for.
There's a couple of Browser extensions that have sorta tried to accomplish this before. Epiverse[1] seems to be the most polished one so far. It originally intended to allow any user to comment on any webpage. But it found that without existing content, few found it useful. So eventually the creator just parsed to see if the webpage was posted on Reddit or Hackernews. The original purpose of it ended up being too expensive to host so it ended up just becoming a HN/Reddit parser. Which, tbh, is basically what I want to build at this point. I'd love to contribute to the project, but I don't have much time and it's closed source
The other similar extensions also just parse HN/Reddit like Newsit[2] (which is open-source) and Thredd[3] (which only parses Reddit). My only real addition to this is that I'd like to include the ability to parse more than just Reddit and HN. I wanna create a discussion aggregator. There's similar sites like Lobste.rs and Lemmy.ml that could also be parsed, but obviously that's not the full extent of where discussions happen around a webpage.
I don't think I have it figured out, and I don't know if anyone ever will, but I think there's a lot to gain if someone is able to someday harness that feeling that you get when you read something really good or find something really cool and wanna see how others responded
In case you are unaware there is https://hypothes.is which might fit the bill. It has the same issue with sparseness of annotations that you mention for epiverse, but I don't see any way to avoid that.
Oh yes, I totally forgot to bring that up. I think somewhere along the way my goals changed from "collaborative web annotation" (which hypothes.is is the best at out of what's out there) to "discussion aggregator." I think the latter was partially born out of a realization that I'd end up making #YetAnotherDiscussionPlatform. Now I have to figure out how to include hypothes.is annotations into my app lol
I'm curious to try out Nyxt. But I see it's not built on Chromium or anything like that. How robust is it at handling random edge cases on the web? Does anybody run into issues where you need to go back to another browser on some pages? (I face this with Firefox even, unfortunately)
I last tried Nyxt three months ago. While it was okay on text-heavy sites, I had a jarring experience in media heavy pages like YouTube. I switched back to Firefox but gonna give Nyxt another try soon.
When I read pdfs, I upload them to Google Drive and make annotations there. For other stuff, likes on HN and Twitter or snippets emailed to myself makes info persistent. If Nyxt was a browser plugin, I would try it out.
After you upload a PDF to Google Drive, you can select text and add comments. That way, you can share the PDF and its comments with collaborators/colleagues etc.
There used to be a number of extensions of this type on old Firefox. I cannot remember exactly this one, but here are a couple to prove what was possible [1]:
- the original Firebug which became developer tools and was cloned to every other browser was just another Firefox extension(!)
- an extension I used a lot was Scrapbook, which let me crawl and store websites (I used it for symfony docs back in 2007-2009 before mobile broadband was available or at least not within reach for me. It would download pages recursively according to simple, useful rules like maxrecursion, only subdirectories and only a certain domain and then rewrite every url on the page to be relative instead of absolute. You could also edit the pages locally.)
- Alerts (or something similar) would check web pages according to simple rules I set up and notify me if it saw significant changes.
[1]: somebody will probably tell that it existed too and was even better, I just didn't know of it.