nolific VS w2g

Yup, I’m using mostly SQLite and tools I wrote using it these days, at least for personal data management.

I use this simple tool for most my notes now:

https://github.com/codazoda/nolific

For temporary notes I use my Ponder web app (it just uses the browsers DB) and is partially inspired by old AlphaSmart word processing machines:

https://github.com/codazoda/ponder

I was looking for a demo, here's the closest thing they have (gif of the features): https://github.com/codazoda/nolific/blob/main/media/x1.gif

A friend of Conor White-Sullivan (Roam's creator) propped up his own take on how to do a notetaking system that does support edges, and then he went a step further and opened it for everyone to edit, so it's just a single shared graph:

<https://github.com/w2g/w2g>

Mek works at the Internet Archive, and it clearly follows the same spirit of "we'll operate the service, feel free to bring your own frontend if you don't like ours". I wasn't happy with the way that one at graph.global tries to subvert/duplicate native browser features, so I put up a minimal "client" for browsing existing nodes that feels similar to the default one, sans annoyances on those specific axes:

<https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline>

I never got around to allowing editing, unfortunately. You'll have to use the default frontend for that (annoying, since it's buggy) or write a client of your own.

The key issue I see with the graph.global model is that you have to use triples. I've found that this results in big hurdles for throughput—i.e., the opposite of notational velocity. The ideal thing would probably be to allow a Roam-like system where you can start out by simply linking two related nodes, and then fill the edge details after the fact. You could sort of approximate this with w2g as it stands by just using a generic is-related-to connector and then reify the relation. This does mean you would lose the ability to query by relation unless you add further attributes or went back and edited the original connector to replace it with something more appropriate before reification. Stopping in your tracks to find the appropriate connector is something I found to have lots of overhead.

This is, in theory, what graph.global is supposed to be (by Mek from OpenLibrary / Internet Archive).

<https://github.com/w2g/w2g>