These types of tools (Roam, Obsidian, Second Brain, etc) get a lot of attention on HN and I've never understood it. It feels like these tools are only being used because they give people a false sense of being in control of their live by digitally hoarding all kinds of stuff even if it's useless.
I've done all my planning and note taking using plain text files for years, and never had the need for these complex tools. I tried Roam and Obsidian because of the hype, logging and connecting everything I read for a few months, but then I burned out and realized they don't help me at all. Most of the value from note taking I get is by writing notes, not by managing them or looking them up later. I'd almost never look up stuff again so all this management effort is wasted. And if I need to find something I can either use Google (no need to keep track of links) or it's so obvious that I can do a simple text keyword search through my notes.
I'm chronically interested in nearly everything, but usually obsessively interested in only one thing at a time for 6 weeks to 6 months...but the topics resurface.
I've started keeping all my notes in Logseq because being able to pull up a map of all my research about, say, small-plot intensive farming, the three times I've really gotten into that topic over the last 15 years and quickly review what I had already learned saves me so much time. I can expand on previous research rather than forgetting I'd already reviewed some particular source and duplicating the research.
I can't do that yet because I've only been using Logseq for about a year, but I don't expect my personality is going to change enough in the future that this will stop being amazingly useful!
I do Dev and manage servers and databases -- I need one place where I can find all my stuff. Googling and going through 15 links for the same issue every 7 months all over again is a chore -- as a knowledge worker. I need to have a base of stuff I can refer to, my own curated knowledge base.
I need the info to be available to me on multiple pcs and even better from my phone so I can refer to common things immediately.
I write down stuff that I know works correctly, but have to use very infrequently -- my tmux config or the correct network config so hyperv will work.
I use Notion for tons of stuff like that.
I use Miro (diagraming app) when I am trying to understand complex stuff for the first time -- where there are tons dependencies and I have no clue what is going on like an existing large codebase.
Text files tend to become very limiting in how you can express and present the information back to yourself in a meaningful way.
Oh not to forget the beautiful syntax highlighting for the correct language with the ability to paste images .. text files just cannot compete. Of course they have a place but notion as a tool is quite useful.
Personally, I tend to think that is OK not to use the tool the way they say it should be used on their websites. I use Obsidian but never cared about neither the mapping/backlinks, logging, etc.
However, when needed, it is there. Here is a tiny tip I found a few days back -- try Obsidian with the Plugin Omnisearch[1]. I'm surprised why this is not built-in like Sublime Text. These tools are a beautiful sanctuary -- a happy place -- if you will, for you to write and be at home.
> I use Obsidian but never cared about neither the mapping/backlinks, logging, etc.
This is exactly why I built the plugin :) It's not that I don't care about tags/links/etc., but every time I tried to use those tools, it was a write-only process. I'll never remember how a note is tagged, or in what folder I "smartly" put it in.
People consider search as a clutch for a lack of organization, but more often than not, these same people spend all their time refining their workflow, try new methods with fancy names, and treat organization as a goal in itself. _That_ I don't care about, I just want to write notes like post-its on a desk, and quickly find them when I need them.
They are not, at least not necessarily. It depends on what you want to do and whether the tool helps in any way to achieve this.
Back when I was doing my PhD, I had lots of PDFs and I had a workflow to mark interesting parts and export them to org-mode with backlinks to the PDF and the citation information. That was already enough for me, although I could imagine I could have used orgmode or another tool for improving the organizing, expanding and reusing of the information.
Nowadays, I mostly care about noting down decisions and action items, primarily in the context of meetings. None of these tools give me an advantage. OneNote on the other hand, despite its shortcomings, integrates with other tools we are using at work and allows sharing with colleagues, which at least is marginally better than a plain text file. Most of the stuff I note down are not relevant within a year, so I don't care about the format, the linking and so on, as long as I can find what I need.
I've tried some techniques or tools after reading HN posts like this one in the past, but I've now accepted that this is not for me. I've decided less note-taking is better and that the medium is not important.
I suppose if you never revisit your own notes then yes, there’s no value in these systems.
Personally I find myself revisiting old notes rather often for a variety of reasons:
- writing annual feedback reports on my peers: by taking brief notes in LogSeq journals tagged with their names I can quickly accumulate feedback on how they did over the year or things they could improve
- the above applies to self-assessments which are often required when asking for a raise or promotion in a “ok why? What did you achieve this year?”
- solving issues specific to my workplace and workflows: while Google and StackOverflow will likely cover 90% of issues you have an arguably there’s no much value in writing about those solutions I often encounter problems specific to my workplace’s infrastructure or services. Taking notes and writing snippets on those is something I often revisit
Top of my head the above reasons make the process worth it for me
I saw some kind of apeal around this time last year and moved to Obsidian.
I’ve been trying to move back to Notes recently.
Obsidian become messy quickly: the temptation to try new ways of working just ended up doing my head in.
Some people can make it work, but the whole thing is fragile. The usual response on the subreddit is ‘you’re doing it wrong’, or ‘you need to be more committed’. Both answers are wrong: people capture, categorise and retrieve information differently and in differ contexts each time.
I learnt to be comfortable with losing information.
I have a very bad brain, logseq helps me answer things i would not be able like when was the last time I've seen someone, what are my most frequented places so I can easily recommend when someone asks, know if I already watched a move before renting it or get nearby concerts so I can plan the weekend before it's too late, quickly find tickets i bought half year ago, how much money did I spent the past trip, and all kind of personal information. all in a single place, just one Ctrl-k away. I only store personal info, no blog posts, technical notes or work stuff.
A few hundred years ago it was common for folks (with the means) to keep commonplace books[0] to track information. What they did, what they read, etc. Outside of school & University, it's very uncommon for people to keep with this tradition. In fact, my son recently graduated HS and it was 10x more common for a teacher to hand out notes than it was for him to take notes, so even that's dying. I'm pretty sure you could deduce my kids' days based on Instagram more than anything.
I think if you assume a world where everyone keeps notes, then these just seem like systems for people that do not have one. But for those that have kept notes, these apps do offer some innovation over the plainest of plain text systems.
I would consider Obsidian to be simple. It's a markdown editor. You don't have to use all the plugins if you don't want to. I barely use any of the plugins, but it's still a great markdown editor.
I confess having been corrupted from text files to org mode, mostly because of the relative ease of sticking timestamps into notes, having links in the files that don't spew the urls all over, having convenient html export, and being an outliner that can collapse chunks of text. I sometimes use the built-in table/spreadsheet feature. There's a bunch more stuff I don't use.
I do refer to and maintain my org files to some extent. Typically I'll get interested in some topic start an org file where I mostly save links haphazardly, with brief comments. I don't put serious effort into cross-linking related entries which a bunch of notes apps seem to expect you to do. That seems like a waste of time. The org files are just info dumps where I throw whatever info I find into a bin of related items. Once or twice I've written something up for publication based on the notes in one of those files, but that meant writing actual words and sentences in an organized sequence, not cross-linking a bunch of notes to each other.
Because they are so low friction when taking notes, while making easy to find information again. Plain text files are fine if you have specific search terms you can search on. Some times you just know that you might have noted something around a certain date or under a broad tag. Other PKM systems require pruning and sorting. I find my self doing some sorting for notes I frequently used, but others I'm happy to leave un sorted and look up by tag if and when I need them. Logseq is great for code snippets too: https://blog.g9n.com/2022/07/01/managing-code-snippets-in-lo...
I disagree that they’re low friction. When I open up Obsidian, I’m presented with a relatively cluttered interface, and need to select a location to place the note.
In Notes, I just need to start a new note and type.
You can use Obsidian in that manner. Cmd+N and start typing. There is a setting to have it create the note in your current folder or at the root. If you're used to Notes.app, then root is probably what you want.
I've started using Logseq only a couple days ago, after having used Bear and Obsidian before.
The thing about my note-taking has always been that I'm creating lists with increasingly nested bullet points, with some occasional prose in-between. The problem being that lists go down on the page (as you add new stuff at the top) and get forgotten. I haven't realized - until recently, that is - that outliner tools are actually created for this very use-case.
I'm specifically not interested in the knowledge-base use-case. It's more like creating lists with points being current thoughts, topics, and ideas, and the sub-bullets being new realisations/further thoughts about the point, with the list occasionally getting very deeply nested. Something akin to discussing with yourself.
Having now given Logseq a try, it looks like it's much closer to the increasingly-nested lists workflow I've been looking for. One of the bigger discoveries was the "turn this block into its own page" command, that kind of made the tool click and is a very good solution for when the lists get too deeply nested.
Btw, what do people recommend for sync? I've heard of data-loss being a common problem with standard cloud sync.
Logseq's own sync is now in testing and you can access it if you're a sponsor ($15/month tier). I became one just to try it out. It works fine but has enough bugs that I wouldn't rely on it yet - but they are responsive to fixing the bugs that we report.
Just saying this to let you know that their sync is reasonably far along in development and one option would be to wait it out.
These tools are struggling it seems to make money and are forcing some super high prices for syncing. Obsidians sync price is nutty. $15/mo for logseq is equally nutty.
I would really urge these companies to try to find a better way. You can’t bend your users over that want seamless sync. Take a little from a larger user base so you aren’t charging so damn much for sync. It’s ridiculous.
Charge $12 a year for some common features as a base package. If users want to go higher up add sync at a reasonable price and give them the same features plus sync.
Sync pricing shouldn’t subsidize free users, at least in my opinion.
It's not 15$/mo for sync, though. They're just opening up the closed alpha in stages, from the highest tiers to the lowest. Right now the ones donating 15$/mo have access.
Have you tried RemNote? Every bullet is a node, so there's no block/page choice to make. The syncing is real-time CRDTs for each bullet, so no conflicts.
Used WorkFlowy for about 7 years, dropped it when I got tired of the lack of feature updates, no end-to-end encryption and only Dropbox for automatic backups.
I use syncthing with logseq and I'm pretty happy with the match up. You do have to be careful when you have multiple logseq instances running at the same time. I try to avoid that. I utilize the re-index feature quite a bit too.
I love syncthing itself though! I used to use resilio sync and syncthing is so much better.
I've been using Logseq for a couple of months. Generally very happy with it. I previously used Roam and prefer the local markdown files vs cloud.
What resources do other users find most useful for Advanced Query documentation and discussion? The official documentation is bleak. I've become comfortable with Datascript and for the most part built out what I need. But nearly all of the really helpful insights and tips have come from random gists and forum posts none of which I have seen in any documentation. Most Google searches bring up pages of examples that are exact copy/pastes of other pages, gists...
That's a very vague privacy policy[0] with more tracking and analytics than I would have expected for something that claims to be "Privacy-First". I guess it only applies to the users' content.
That must be for the original version, which was online. You can download Logseq and use it like any other local app. I don't know how they'd get access to user content.
I have to agree. I tried getting LogSeq approved at my workplace for use, and part of its denial is that LogSeq's written privacy policy is so very bad. I hope the team can find someone to improve it.
To add to the other reply you got, their own sync (which they're testing right now) claims to end-to-end encrypted your data (and, if I recall correctly, filenames/paths too?)
I'm currently using Logseq and have tried Obsidian and FOAM. I prefer the outline-based notes and journal-oriented design of Logseq. For me the killer feature is the way it integrates a PDF reader with annotation. I hear some people use Logseq and Obsidian in overlap and jump to Obsidian for long form text entries into their knowledgebase.
I love LogSeq and am deeply impressed by what they have achieved in very short time. The embedded PDF reader is quite good and the option to add comments directly as blocks is amazing. Making queries is still a bit hard for beginners and not as flexible as in e.g. TiddlyWiki (https://tiddlywiki.com/), but it is becoming increasingly powerful
There are, however, some annoyances left; for example, the support for ordinary checkboxes (not todo elements) is surprisingly limited for a software based on lists
Well, yes and no. You can use the todo system, as you mention, by adding TODO or LATER or DOING or something. And in a block, you can also do something like
- This is an item
* [ ] This is an open checkbox
* [X] This is a checked checkbox
and it will render as expected. However, you can not write
- [ ] This is a checkbox
and have it rendered as a checkbox, which I think is a bit strange
The one feature that would just MAKE my PKM would be if Logseq could basically do for epubs what it can do for PDFs.
I spend hours every day reading epubs, highlighting them, adding notes. It's almost all in KOReader, but it ends up trapped there.
When I highlight and annotate PDFs in Logseq, they become connected with allllll my other notes. I even got a system running for scanning paper I receive to PDF, adding an OCR layer, and importing to Logseq.
But I spend something like 200x the amount of time reading epubs as PDFs and I haven't found any local/FOSS tool that can bridge this gap.
Web Annotations would in theory work better for epubs than they do for pdfs.
Making web annotations in PDFs is either coordinate based (page + rectangles) or text bases (quoted text). The quoted text in PDFs is error-prone because PDF is a layout format. Text quotations are more precise in epubs.
The base url for such annotations should be content-addressable storage, i.e. a hash instead of a plain url.
Wow, thanks so much for sharing this. I just decided to switch my life over to org-roam from Obsidian, and this makes me feel so much less locked into that decision! I decided against Logseq as my primary tool for other reasons, but this is great to know.
a large appeal of making your PKM Markdown-based is that you get data portability and compatibility with multiple tools. don’t dismiss Logseq, but do know it’s more limited than other Markdown PKMs on this angle.
i have an ancient PKM that i used to edit with vim. recently i installed Obsidian, Dendron, Logseq and a few others and just hopped between these daily to manage that PKM instead. Logseq’s journalling and time-tracking is a beauty, but you can’t use it on a PKM worked on by other tools without it stripping every blank line from your Markdown files and converting every top-level item to a bullet point.
in the end i always return to Obsidian. it plays nicely in any multi-tool environment i’ve dreamt up: it’s super easy to switch to, and a decade from now should i have a reason to, away from.
I had two main problems with LogSeq when I used it:
1. Not designed from the ground-up to prevent data loss. Has had data-loss issues in the past.
<strikethrough>2. An electron app that doesn't let you open multiple documents at once. (edit: nevermind, seems like they did lots of feature development here)</strikethrough>
That said, I don't know of any other good local-first outliners (i.e. like Workflowy).
Having used other note taking software for the past decade (in particular outliners) Logseq is my new favourite, I just wish they'd focus on performance issues though.
Indexing and general responsiveness slows down massively once you have a few million words stored, and you have to break up your data into many smaller notes or you'll suffer even greater slowdown. Despite this I'm putting up with it at the moment because they seem to be making good progress improving the app and it's open-source unlike many of their competitors.
Admittedly poor performance has been my primary gripe in the 7mos I’ve been using LogSeq on a near-daily basis. I dunno whether the issue stems from the usage of Electron or if text-graphs are really so heavy even an M1 can’t cope but personally I’d gladly pay for a freaking subscription if it meant I could navigate between pages without a very noticeable lag
A significant number of people in the HN community either have ADHD or attributes resembling ADHD.
I've personally found browsing websites or even notes in Obsidian to frequently be overwhelming. Switching to an outliner like Logseq really helps ground me and gives my brain room to realign itself on the screen. In particular, being able to click on a single bullet point and make that the app's focus is really the most helpful. If I'm distracted, I have huge struggles remembering what I was looking at before, but with Logseq I can just look at what's focused and I'm good again.
List manipulation features feels much better too. I may type a giant pile of bullets in one place and later realise I want them elsewhere. This is possible in Obsidian, but feels better in Logseq, with lots of keyboard shortcuts and mouse shortcuts available.
I use Logseq personally and for work almost daily since a year ago or so. It's pretty nice and the "least bad" PKM platform I'm aware of (no mandatory subscription, local data and source availability are important factors).
I wonder if the sync feature will be open source eventually and allow us to host it.
For me the Holy Grail of note-taking app would be:
- free and open source
- offline first
- encrypted sync
- collaborative
- backlinks and cool things like logseq queries
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying but I want to be able to collaborate with anyone. As an example, my mom wouldn't be interested in paying for a software that she would barely use even if it's a software that I can't live without.
According to [1] they don't plan to open source it due to "business considerations."
I'm not against people making a buck, but as far as I understand this isn't permitted by the AGPL, which logseq's current authors are bound to as much as anyone else. (Unless they have all past contributors grant them a secondary license.)
It's likely the sync protocol will be reimplemented for self-hosting, but I'd assume the mobile apps will hardcode the server address to encourage use of their paid sync service.
It does seem like they could benefit from making it an option to not automatically start a new bullet/section when adding a line return. This threw me off at first and it not ideal for everyone's workflows (though, tbh, I eventually realised that making almost everything into nested bullets was actually a very effective way of organizing my information and I have been converted over to loving it!)
While some of the features of LogSeq are great I find it has a major drawback.
The MarkDown files it generates aren't compatible with other similar programs (Obsidian for instance).
It adds 2 spaces which makes thins incompatible with others.
This is the major advantage of Obsidian, it is not too much opiniated about how the RAW file should look. Which makes moving form one editor to other pretty easy.
Logseq just lost me as a daily user yesterday. I downloaded obsidian after they announced 1.0 and realized they now had plugins for almost everything I was using logseq for (maybe not hierarchy, and outline zooming isn't great) and didn't have incessant bugs I had been putting up with in logseq. It shouldn't take a year to clean up cursor movement.
I used Logseq for a while but the big problem I had with it is how strongly it is focused on bullet points. Posting long form text is cumbersome because the default paste just turns everything into lists on newlines, and the performance on blocks of text was bad as well. To the point where it just died when pasting a few paragraphs.
I'm a convert. It's opinionated, but I gave it a chance and its way of taking notes is better than what I used to do. I'm recalling my own notes a lot more than in the past as well.
The sync story is a little clunky, though. For now, I've mounted my Google Drive to a local dir and use that store my Logseq notes.
Is it programmable? Can I write snippets of code within logseq to traverse the graph and aggregate some data? I can imagine combining tensorflow.js with such code to create a personal search engine.
I know Logseq is intended as an offline-first solution, but I really wish I could self-host it as a website and have all notes saved on my server (as opposed to having to sync with local storage).
Looks like there's an open issue on github for the same feature request:
I use logseq everyday at work and love it. I append tags to many things, when I have to find information regarding a project, I go to the project page and find all the references in there, sorted by time of entry.
I also have tags for learning, tags for management, some blocks have multiple tags. In general, it's a powerful worklog that evolves into a knowledge base.
Thanks to the tagging system, I actually find what. I'm looking for
I've started using Slack for this. I send messages to myself. And use the basic formatting to maintain lists, links and such. And various icons (green check mark etc.) to mark something as done, not relevant anymore (strike-through), and just delete things that are no longer useful to me. Of course there are limits on how far back you can go with the free account, but we use it at work as well. So far, it's been really easy - at least for to-do type of things.
Let me share my note taking and journalling approach.
I create a GitHub repository and create a markdown file and then I create numbered markdown headings for each entry. For each entry I journal my thought. I try trigger the same idea in myself from reading the thought.
When I get to 100-400 entries I create a new repository and repeat the process.
My computer journals are all created and published in the open on GitHub you can find links in my profile. I am interested in futuristic computer integrations and parallelism.
Is it possible to have 'privacy-first' and to share notes with others or even publish them?
It would be nice to discover people who have notes with the same keywords or who have annotated the same sentences in an article.
Medium offers some of that but it's only on medium articles, and it's not possible to intersect annotations and notes. E.g. how could I find people who have an 80% overlap of interest in a set of articles that I have curated on some topic?
Dynalist is better in almost all respects. It's also by the same creators of Obsidian. In fact one possible con is that development pretty much halted now that they're focused on Obsidian, but it's still perfectly functional and featureful.
I'll put in a word for Checkvist (https://checkvist.com/). I find it the best of the online outliners, which manages to improve year on year while maintaining its fundamental virtues (notably - it's the most keyboard-centric web app I've used). I noted (with a slight shock!) recently that I've been using it since 2015.
I think the biggest question for my own demographic is whether or not the sync and real-time collaborative features will be included in the open source version.
I checked the FAQ, but the wording is not very clear as to whether they will be fully featured and allow full user control over these two critical features
I've done all my planning and note taking using plain text files for years, and never had the need for these complex tools. I tried Roam and Obsidian because of the hype, logging and connecting everything I read for a few months, but then I burned out and realized they don't help me at all. Most of the value from note taking I get is by writing notes, not by managing them or looking them up later. I'd almost never look up stuff again so all this management effort is wasted. And if I need to find something I can either use Google (no need to keep track of links) or it's so obvious that I can do a simple text keyword search through my notes.
Can someone explain why these tools are so great?