markdown-preview-enhanced VS logseq

I tried out Dendron a few months ago for personal note-taking, technical docs, and organizing tasks. I was excited at first, but overall the cons outweighed the pros for me.

Pros/exciting things:

1) There's a simplicity in using VS Code for writing notes and docs if (and probably only if) you already spend your day in VS Code, like I do.

2) The Markdown Preview Enhanced VS Code extension (which is a dependency of Dendron) is super cool for having so many "batteries" included. For example, check out all the diagram types it supports: https://shd101wyy.github.io/markdown-preview-enhanced/#/diag... . I still use it, separately from Dendron.

3) Storing my data as plain text on disk (backed up by GitHub or Dropbox) has nice properties compared to how SaaS apps do it (e.g. if you use Notion, say, your data materializes out of "the cloud" when you launch the app, and otherwise has no tangible existence). When my data is plain text on my local disk, I own it; I know I can export it, I can run whatever editor or program on it; I can access past versions (via git or Dropbox); I don't have to worry about it being corrupted, or accidentally deleting some of it, or not being able to access it because of server issues, or not being able to export it, or being offline, and so on.

4) The Dendron docs ("wiki") site is created using Dendron. It's a cool thought that I could create a nice website of documentation or notes without leaving VS Code.

Cons:

1) Can't access my notes from mobile.

2) Major warts in navigating between notes. Each note has a tab for editing it and a tab for viewing/previewing it. Opening a note behaves differently depending on which tab is focused. Clicking links to go from one note to another doesn't work very well.

3) Poor full-text search (just VS Code's code search).

4) You can't specify an order for notes, only unordered hierarchy, and you can't easily view multiple notes at once, which means keeping lots of short notes, or using different notes for different sections of a document, doesn't really work. There's a tension in any note-taking tool between short notes and long notes. Should notes be as short as possible? Or stretch into long documents? The ideal tool IMO would blur the difference between an ordered hierarchy of sections within a document and an ordered hierarchy of notes within some grouping. Dendron makes it seem like it is for keeping thousands of small notes, but the ways in which you can view, organize, and navigate between notes (lack of good "browse," search, links, lists, seeing multiple notes, next/previous note, and so on) are so limited that it makes more sense to write long documents. In which case, all you really need is Markdown Preview Enhanced and the file system.

My favorite implementation is Markdown Preview Enhanced, to be exact, @shd101wyy/mume, but I want a little more features...

VSCode or Atom IDE with Markdown Preview Enhanced

Editor preview: Yes

And one of the best tools to create PDF is Visual Studio Code, if you know how to use Markdown Preview Enhanced properly. (I've just noticed that I can use this in Atom as well.)

Logseq support via our Logseq Plugin

Sorry, but _what exactly_ «it seems to do» from your point of view?

My «second brain» now is almost 300Mb of text, pictures, sound files, PDF and other stuff. As I already mentioned, it contains tables, mathematical formulae, sheet music, cross-references, code samples, UML diagrams and graphs in Graphviz format. It is versioned, indexed by local search engine, analyzed by AI assistant and shared between many computers and mobile devices. And (last but not least) it works: it allows me to solve my tasks way more faster than with the assistant of external, non-personalized tools (like ChatGPT, StackExchange or Google).

I know no tools for all this tasks except org-mode. Well, maybe Evernote in the 2010-s was something similar — but with less features, with more bugs and with worse interface.

Personal note-taking _is_ a complex task per se (well, at least for someone like typical HN visitor). I've seen many note-taking tools, that were ridiculously featureless, stupid and inconvenient because they were _not_ complex enough.

> Sure if one wants to do emacs-gardening it is fine.

1)You can use org-mode outside Emacs. See for example Logseq (https://logseq.com/), organice (https://organice.200ok.ch/) or EasyOrg.

2)Org-mode works in Emacs out of the box, you don't need any «emacs-gardening» to use org-mode.

3)The term «Emacs-gardening» itself sound a bit like hate-speech for me. The complexity of Emacs customization is overrated, mostly due to opinions of people who never used Emacs or used it in the previous millennium.

Obsidian is great.

For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/

For an opensource alternative to Obsidian checkout Logseq (1). I spent a while thinking obsidian was opensource out of my own ignorance and was disappointed when I learned it was not.

1: https://logseq.com/

I use logseq to keep journal of my daily work.

While Emacs and Org mode can certainly be used for this (and, when they can't, you can always inject little python/js scripts in your emacs config to take care of specific things), I'd also recommend you take a look at Logseq.

My work notes (and email) has shifted into emacs but I'm still editing zimwiki formatted files w/ the many years of notes accumulated in it Though I've lost it moving to emacs, the Zim GUI has a nice backlink sidebar that's amazing for rediscovery. Zim also facilitates hierarchy (file and folder) renames which helps take the pressure off creating new files. I didn't make good use of the map plugin, but it's occasionally useful to see the graph of connected pages.

I'm (possibly unreasonably) frustrated with using the browser for editing text. Page loads and latency are noticeably, editor customization is limited, and shortcuts aren't what I've muscle memory for -- accidental ctrl-w (vim:swap focus, emacs/readline delete word) is devastating.

Zim and/or emacs is super speedy. Especially with local files. I using syncthing to get keep computers and phone synced. But, if starting fresh, I might look at things that using markdown or org-mode formatting instead. logseq (https://logseq.com/) looks pretty interesting there.

Sorry! Long answer.