AppFlowy VS obsidian-outliner

💾 Source code: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy 👕 Size: M 🛠️ Stack: Flutter, Rust

You can use Rust with QML[1].

QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory leaks that caused my computer to hang. It's better to know you have a bug than for it to be hidden from you.

I agree with parent commenter, saying these cross-platform frameworks will end up supporting the least common denominator set of features. But I found with external open source libraries, the community is catching up very fast. For example, you want the awesome translucency macOS apps have for your Qt app? Here you go[4]. Many such cases. It's also pretty straightforward to add your own custom OS-dependent code, especially so, if someone already open sourced his approach. I recently wanted to move the traffic light buttons on macOS for my app, but couldn't figure the Objective-C code for that. I ended up looking at either Tauri or Electron source code and found my answer.

[1] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

[2] https://www.get-plume.com/

[3] https://www.appflowy.io/

[4] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

AppFlowy - GPL Licensed - their unique selling point is that they're farther along than SiYuan or Affine on their database table functionality. Both Siyuan and Affine have database tables for project management but Appflowy's solution is solid. https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy

Download from https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy/releases/tag/0.3.0

Just enabled it for AppFlowy macOS. https://docs.flutter.dev/perf/impeller#macos

AppFlowy has doesn't have links to pages, but they're working on it, and "This feature will be expanded to support Mention a block in the future." (https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy/issues/2196)

It seems like there's a lot of recent interest and effort in open-source or self-hosted Notion-like/markdown-with-widgets applications and platforms. AppFlowy (https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy) comes to mind; I attended one of their monthly "town hall" meetings a few months back, and looks like they're rapidly increasing in popularity. I think there was another similar project like this on HN front page last week, IIRC.

This makes me happy, because I switched to Obsidian primarily for local-first file storage in a platform-agnostic format. I've learned to love many things about Obsidian and am writing a few plugins myself, but there are still several Notion-esq functionalities I wish I had, and I find myself handing off between Obsidian and other webapps for certain effort, like team project management.

I used to get far more excited to explore new projects like BlockSuite, and I really appreciate their documentation, but I find it hard to justify allocating time to reviewing and trying out new tools when I still have much more improve on with my Obsidian usage; this is especially true of newer projects where I'm unsure of their shelf life.

To assuage my internal conflict I remind myself that I think plaintext is fundamentally the right choice for much knowledge collection, and I'm proud to say that if the internet shut down, I'd retain a significant growing fraction of my personal data.

For your particular complaints, check out obsidian-columns and Creases or Obsidian Outliner. The new Canvas built in plugin might also be of interest.

[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md). It is a killer app. Add one [plugin](https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner) and you have an outliner like Dynalist. Add another [plugin](https://obsidian-tasks-group.github.io/obsidian-tasks/) and you have a perfect GTD environment. All free, all in markdown.

Happy to share some of what's been working for me. Some of this is stuff I'm actively using, some of it hasn't quite made it into the "day to day use" yet, but I've been experimenting with. (Random personal advice: Never let your note taking tools feel like using them is work, that's the first step towards not keeping notes!)

- For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

- For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian

- Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images

- For analysing the content for some useful stats there's: https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis but this is for a relatively specific sort of analysis.

- More general and flexible analysis and graph visualisations are available from the combination of https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain , https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview and https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... in short query your notes and note metadata like its a database, build reports and data visualisations, and then excalibrain is a whole thing built on top of that power.

- Dynamic embeds of outside content are available from https://github.com/dhamaniasad/obsidian-rich-links and https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed depending on the style and use you like. While there is a built in functionality to preview the links to other notes when you hover over them https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Page+preview which has a demo here https://youtu.be/dmnVml_jbsQ?t=222

- And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when you use the refactor to cut out a new note, the automations will trigger, ask you to give the note a new heading, tags, and you have a little script that checks last modified time of the folder tree of text files, and looks at the folder of the last modified time and asks you in that popup if you want to move the new note to the folder the note you cut it from is located in. Or anything else you can imagine using outside automation and scripting tools on your plain text markdown files.

These are just a start and if you haven't already browsed the plugins at https://obsidian.md/plugins I wholeheartedly recommend it, people are adding new cool things pretty often and other plugins add new functionality that makes them worth checking out if they were previously not something that you found interesting. I do a read through of the plugin list probably at least once every month or two just to see what's new, and more often if I'm experimenting with changes to my workflow.

IMO: Obsidian does a good job in making me reflect and review notes, but not enough to prompt me to write more of them. Logseq does the exact opposite.

There's nothing wrong with Obsidian per se, but that's probably the crux of my issue with it. I'm not very naturally inclined to taking notes in the first place, and Obsidian just hasn't made me take that many more notes than I used to.

Logseq on the other hand has an editor that makes it hard for you to even write longer / multi-line blocks. In some ways, I suspect that writing in bullet points or smaller blocks encourages shorter but more frequent note writing, and my brain seems to respond well to that. Obsidian can technically do that to some degree, but the editor doesn't do enough to make me write shorter and more atomic notes, even with the Outliner[0] plugin installed.

[0]: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

As far as workflowly, the general workings of workflowly is an "outliner". I have been using Obsidian.md and the Outliner plugin: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner .

I have seen Outliner plug-in in Obsidian https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

It lacks a true outliner. There is a plugin, https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner, but up to now it is difficult to manage complex multi-line nested list.

The drop down Arrows for each Paragraph Looks like the plugin Outliner.

Athens Research (https://www.athensresearch.org/) uses a workflowy like UI. It comes with a bunch of other features, but you can ignore those pretty easily.

Obsidian with the Outliner plugin is also nice - although Obsidian isn't open source, it is free and all your data is stored locally as markdown files.

https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner