It just so happens I am looking for a solid knowledge management application. Too bad this is Apple-only.
I've gone from Obsidian (No structure), to LogSeq (Love the structured notes, not configurable enough), to Org-mode on Emacs a few days ago, and I think I'm probably going to stay there.
Notes end up being process, too. It's basically a way of being intentional with how you apply your attention throughout changing mental contexts. I might have a really good idea today and then six months from now it's just totally off of my radar. Notes help with that context switching.
hello org-mode friend! I've been on a similar journey and over the last month I've just been vibe building a replacement for logseq. So far: native macOS, high polish (I was a Bear user before logseq), and uses pi-durable so I can launch an agent from any line.
I tried using Bear many years ago. My issue with it was that while it was using markdown to format, everything is locked away in a SQLite DB, which kills a significant benefit of markdown notes.
I like Obsidian because it’s just stores a folder full of markdown files, and I can read/edit those files with whatever I want. It feels like a lot less lock-in than with Bear.
Shiny Frog, the team behind Bear, have been working on a file backed notes app for years. Recently revived and rebranded from Panda to https://lettera.md.
I do understand the sentiment, but a couple of things that make it ok for me: 1. exporting everything is simple 2. the official bear CLI is quite capable, and Claude has no trouble using it to handle all manner of searching, organizing, you name it.
Exporting is nice and all, but that is cumbersome if I want to edit something in place using a different app. For example, there are some things with Obsidian where it would be much easier to do what I'm trying to do in a full code editor, like VS Code. It's nice to be able to just open up the file, make my edits, save it, and instantly see the changes reflected in Obsidian. In another case, I wanted to easily log things throughout the day and append a file I had in Obsidian. Being a simple text file, I was able to do this with Bash, Hammerspoon (Lua), and AppleScript at various points in time... having to learn and use a special CLI command to append text to a file feels like overkill.
Having to use an LLM to search text also feels like overkill. One of the things I like markdown notes for is the simplicity of it. I can just use grep if I want. I can open the files on a computer from 1990 or 2090 and it will work. Having to bring in all these other tools into the mix hurts that utility. At that point, I might as well just use Apple Notes.
I have built a lightweight, note taking application that focuses on quick note taking, and fully keyboard based usage. Notes are all one liner, and it supports minimum Markdown, you can manage tasks, reminders, do inline calculations, unlimited undo/redo. You can organize notes by project and categories.
The indispensable feature of LogSeq for me was structuring my notes into blocks and being able to link to those blocks in other areas. My thoughts flow into each other and I'd like to be able to document those links. Org-roam is what (kind of) allows this for me.
on the surface, it's a boring hierarchical note taking app, and you can use it just as one, keeping things simple. But then, you can jump into the rabbit hole and figure out how attributes, templates and properties inheritance can give your notes a structure, be organized as collections, and become a very dependable PKMS.
I personally settled on Trilium after a long search for a PKMS to fit my needs, including Obsidian, LogSeq and many others. My top criteria were:
- I need typed notes: if I'm set to maintain long references of People, Places, Movies, … I want the system to keep track of types, attributes, and relations, just like a RDBMS would. In practice, many systems fail at that and give you a ton of maintenance work just to keep your knowledge base consistent, well-structured and usable
- I need something that syncs with my server at home, and lets me work offline when needed. Trilium client app does that without fuss nor requires subscription/premium/membership.
- I need r/w access to my notes on devices which I don't own (e.g. a work computer), so a fully-featured and secure web version with MFA must exist as an alternative to a client application, and again, Trilium delivers there.
I've been daily-driving Trilium for almost 3 years now, and I haven't stumbled upon an alternative with envy. OTOH, Trilium got (much) refined and gained lots of clever features.
For movies, nothing very special, I generally just use the note body to record impressions. The extent of the "typing" happening here is limited to making sure (by the use of a Template⁰) that all my "Movie" notes share the same icon, and possibly colour, so that they are easy to identify on e.g. a "Note Map"¹.
What I'm after is the ability to retrieve "when" I watched that movie, "where" and "with whom", and this context is inferred by the journal: I will have a "day note"² containing a block with a sentence such as "10pm - Went to the theatre at @<theater> to see @<movie> with @<person1> and @<person2>". This will create backlinks (just like in LogSeq, Obsidian & al.) in a manner that opening either of @<theater>, @<movie>, or @<person> will lead me straight to the context if I ever need it.
Now, say I want to build a dynamic view/report on something, say for instance, all the times I went to the movies at @<theater>, and render that on a calendar, "Search notes"³ enable that: I can search for all the journal references to @<theater>. More than one theater? Have you by chance added a `"Place Type":="Theater"` attribute to your "Place" notes? you are covered. Do you need fancy search? You can use search scripts, or just tap into the SQLite database directly.
In other contexts, Trilium's properties/attributes management is a godsend. For instance I have "work projects", with "customers", "project codes", "work locations", etc, and having the ability to represent those projects on a timeline with the calendar collection, or as a semantic graph (of who does what/where) at a glance is really nice. If I want to extend the "data model" by having a "Project Manager" field, I just need to add it to the template and all the dependent notes are reflected away, and then I can bulk edit them in a grid collection (which is not too dissimilar to a Notion database for instance).
You can probably see how the searchability from above, combined with basic attributes management, can make dealing with certain daily tasks very easy (e.g. your boss asking "how many times this quarter did an Azure outage cost us uptime on application X", whether to renew a gym membership "how many times did I go to this gym last quarter", …)
I’ve used Bear for years now and it’s great for writing notes and composing essays. I should probably subscribe to Bear Pro but they don’t have a lifetime option and I despise subscription models.
Luckily the paywall is mostly for export tools and cloud backup. The latter I don’t need, and it’s only a minor inconvenience to use Airdrop + pandoc for the former.
The subscription model is probably the main reason I turned from Bear to Typora (which is available via one-time payment and doesn't even require an Apple ID).
I'm gradually replacing most of the software I use with software I conjure myself, and Bear is the reason I'm probably never going to write an editor; it's not clear to me how I could improve it. Emacs is probably out the door by the end of 2027, but I'd be surprised if I wasn't still using Bear for years from now. It's quite good.
I'd rather buy (if it's actually some semblance of ownership) a very good app made by people who spend their time keeping it good, then attempt to think I'm the best one to make all of my software. If it's a subscription for something that's not necessarily great and it can be remade cheaply and maintained with low overhead, then the answer is clearer.
I see people vibing out markdown apps like they take their morning shit, while I just paid Bear a small amount of money and have gleefully used it every day for 10 years, and I hope to continue to use it for at least the next 5.
Part of maturity for me over the years has been picking my battles carefully and reducing the things I feel I need to be opinionated about or responsible for. Not every piece of software needs to be perfectly customizable for my workflow or the fastest or embody some esoteric philosophical ideal. Being forced to do anything is a rarity unless your job requires you to use SharePoint or Notion or whatever
Interesting — I'd say the editor is actually Bear's weakest spot. I keep fighting it all the time and wish it didn't try to do things "automagically" for me.
For example, editing a set of tags causes endless frustration. I can never guess what the tool will do next or what it expects me to do.
I've been using Bear for a long time. I tried Obsidian to move off Bear, but it didn't last long. The Bear UX is just great and that's what's kept me around this long.
You are probably thinking of https://joplinapp.org if you thought of open source and Joplin also stores note in a db and it does something worse, it even names the files as UUID (last time I checked).
Bear is such a fantastic app. They nailed the editor feel and function early on and then have consistently improved stability and performance ever since.
They worked on a file backed editor at some point called Panda, but decided to scrap it due to the trade offs of not controlling the storage format. Really respect the focus on their core USP.
Edit: Looks like Panda was recently revived under a new name and is currently in beta: https://lettera.md.
The support is super friendly and responsive and sync just works perfectly and consistently.
Their only response to the AI mania has been adding an official embedded cli to interact with the DB safely.
Sync happens through iCloud, so you aren't forced to adopt a bunch of new threat models.
They are currently working on a web client. This has me slightly worried, but it's apparently been a recurring request for people forced to use Windows at work. I trust they know what they're doing.
I’ve been building something like bear for a bit, https://blackbear.app. Supports a few more things than notes (sheets, slides, docs, audio and video files, etc.), with the key differentiator being real time collaboration and collocation of files alongside your calendar and tasks. It’s a passion project, love the bear project as well, definitely an inspiring company
I've been using Bear for a VERY long time. It's still my go-to note taker, but lately I find myself using an AI transcription/note taker tool for meetings with other people. It's the only thing that has me loosening my grip on Bear.
For example, I can ask my AI note taker things to look through all of my meeting notes with a particular customer and pull out some testimonials for my website.
I really like Bear, but the built in Markdown editing is trying to be too smart for its own good and is often frustrating. So much that I am now also paying for a Drafts subscription. And to be honest, if Drafts suddenly started supporting drag&drop images (think lab notebook with oscilloscope screenshots), I'd be dropping Bear.
Bear also becomes noticeably slower once you drop all those images into your database.
I don’t know how apps like this will survive, honestly. Bear is a nice app; I used it back in the day. but what’s the point when you can just build your own custom version of this in about an hour?
321% of this statistics was pulled out from thin air.
The whole point of software is/was that someone else takes care of it for you. It has been a one way street about only making money until recently. But LLM flips the switch on this I hope. If it's bad, someone could actually whip out an LLM and recreate it. But anyone can create software. The expensive part of software is maintaining it. And everybody starts creating custom software for everything, it's gonna be super costly to built and maintain them.
I've been a long-time user of Bear and I remember when they first launched. I think it's one of those apps that made history for its clean UI and macOS-like experience.
Lately I've been trying some of the markdown file-based editors, mostly to be able to view and edit documentation written by LLMs while working on projects.
I've tried a few. Obsidian, Cogito (in beta) and ZenNote, which I see no one mentioned. For now I settled with ZenNotes because it came with vim motions out of the box. But I'm also liking the Cogito approach, with a much cleaner UI.
I have a love-hate relationship with notes apps. I've been looking for "the one" for a long time, but I can't even explain what I expect from it, so the search is basically impossible. I used Obsidian for quite a while and ended up getting tired of it, I'm going to give Bear a try
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] threadI've gone from Obsidian (No structure), to LogSeq (Love the structured notes, not configurable enough), to Org-mode on Emacs a few days ago, and I think I'm probably going to stay there.
Maybe you have perfect memory, but I have found it critical for my job.
I like Obsidian because it’s just stores a folder full of markdown files, and I can read/edit those files with whatever I want. It feels like a lot less lock-in than with Bear.
As for revivals, notation velocity might get revived. https://notational.net
Having to use an LLM to search text also feels like overkill. One of the things I like markdown notes for is the simplicity of it. I can just use grep if I want. I can open the files on a computer from 1990 or 2090 and it will work. Having to bring in all these other tools into the mix hurts that utility. At that point, I might as well just use Apple Notes.
https://mtarin.com/projects/nift/
Core point is simplicity, and frictionless note taking, and high performance, my dev version, can work with 12k notes without any issues.
Data is stored as text file.
Demo version is also available
I am looking for feedback, and wondering what would make people actually interested to buying this.
It's completely hand written, no AI assisted code.
on the surface, it's a boring hierarchical note taking app, and you can use it just as one, keeping things simple. But then, you can jump into the rabbit hole and figure out how attributes, templates and properties inheritance can give your notes a structure, be organized as collections, and become a very dependable PKMS.
I personally settled on Trilium after a long search for a PKMS to fit my needs, including Obsidian, LogSeq and many others. My top criteria were:
- I need typed notes: if I'm set to maintain long references of People, Places, Movies, … I want the system to keep track of types, attributes, and relations, just like a RDBMS would. In practice, many systems fail at that and give you a ton of maintenance work just to keep your knowledge base consistent, well-structured and usable
- I need something that syncs with my server at home, and lets me work offline when needed. Trilium client app does that without fuss nor requires subscription/premium/membership.
- I need r/w access to my notes on devices which I don't own (e.g. a work computer), so a fully-featured and secure web version with MFA must exist as an alternative to a client application, and again, Trilium delivers there.
I've been daily-driving Trilium for almost 3 years now, and I haven't stumbled upon an alternative with envy. OTOH, Trilium got (much) refined and gained lots of clever features.
I probably sound like the fan that I am, but you can have a look by yourself at https://app.triliumnotes.org/
I imagine Most people will run out of steam adding properties consistently to their notes
What I'm after is the ability to retrieve "when" I watched that movie, "where" and "with whom", and this context is inferred by the journal: I will have a "day note"² containing a block with a sentence such as "10pm - Went to the theatre at @<theater> to see @<movie> with @<person1> and @<person2>". This will create backlinks (just like in LogSeq, Obsidian & al.) in a manner that opening either of @<theater>, @<movie>, or @<person> will lead me straight to the context if I ever need it.
Now, say I want to build a dynamic view/report on something, say for instance, all the times I went to the movies at @<theater>, and render that on a calendar, "Search notes"³ enable that: I can search for all the journal references to @<theater>. More than one theater? Have you by chance added a `"Place Type":="Theater"` attribute to your "Place" notes? you are covered. Do you need fancy search? You can use search scripts, or just tap into the SQLite database directly.
In other contexts, Trilium's properties/attributes management is a godsend. For instance I have "work projects", with "customers", "project codes", "work locations", etc, and having the ability to represent those projects on a timeline with the calendar collection, or as a semantic graph (of who does what/where) at a glance is really nice. If I want to extend the "data model" by having a "Project Manager" field, I just need to add it to the template and all the dependent notes are reflected away, and then I can bulk edit them in a grid collection (which is not too dissimilar to a Notion database for instance).
You can probably see how the searchability from above, combined with basic attributes management, can make dealing with certain daily tasks very easy (e.g. your boss asking "how many times this quarter did an Azure outage cost us uptime on application X", whether to renew a gym membership "how many times did I go to this gym last quarter", …)
⁰: https://docs.triliumnotes.org/user-guide/advanced-usage/temp...
¹: https://docs.triliumnotes.org/user-guide/note-types/note-map
²: https://docs.triliumnotes.org/user-guide/advanced-usage/adva...
³: https://docs.triliumnotes.org/user-guide/concepts/navigation...
https://reflect.app/
https://github.com/team-reflect/reflect-open
Original HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35303670
> Back in 2013, three friends who loved Apple and design couldn’t find a notes app they liked, so they built their own. That side project became Bear.
Luckily the paywall is mostly for export tools and cloud backup. The latter I don’t need, and it’s only a minor inconvenience to use Airdrop + pandoc for the former.
Why?
Compare that to being forced to use someone else's highly opinionated software that might have paid pro features you need or don't need.
What a strange question to ask.
I see people vibing out markdown apps like they take their morning shit, while I just paid Bear a small amount of money and have gleefully used it every day for 10 years, and I hope to continue to use it for at least the next 5.
Part of maturity for me over the years has been picking my battles carefully and reducing the things I feel I need to be opinionated about or responsible for. Not every piece of software needs to be perfectly customizable for my workflow or the fastest or embody some esoteric philosophical ideal. Being forced to do anything is a rarity unless your job requires you to use SharePoint or Notion or whatever
For example, editing a set of tags causes endless frustration. I can never guess what the tool will do next or what it expects me to do.
Images appear in the notes-list.
Minimal tags-first organization, rather than Obsidians mixture of files and tags.
...and that's it. It's the only app that has never given me any reason to switch in ~10 Years.
They worked on a file backed editor at some point called Panda, but decided to scrap it due to the trade offs of not controlling the storage format. Really respect the focus on their core USP.
Edit: Looks like Panda was recently revived under a new name and is currently in beta: https://lettera.md.
The support is super friendly and responsive and sync just works perfectly and consistently.
Their only response to the AI mania has been adding an official embedded cli to interact with the DB safely.
Sync happens through iCloud, so you aren't forced to adopt a bunch of new threat models.
They are currently working on a web client. This has me slightly worried, but it's apparently been a recurring request for people forced to use Windows at work. I trust they know what they're doing.
For example, I can ask my AI note taker things to look through all of my meeting notes with a particular customer and pull out some testimonials for my website.
Bear also becomes noticeably slower once you drop all those images into your database.
To be honest I just use a code editor with markdown files in a folder now. The journey is over.
The whole point of software is/was that someone else takes care of it for you. It has been a one way street about only making money until recently. But LLM flips the switch on this I hope. If it's bad, someone could actually whip out an LLM and recreate it. But anyone can create software. The expensive part of software is maintaining it. And everybody starts creating custom software for everything, it's gonna be super costly to built and maintain them.
It even lets you switch to "Source Mode" for quick edits.
Lately I've been trying some of the markdown file-based editors, mostly to be able to view and edit documentation written by LLMs while working on projects.
I've tried a few. Obsidian, Cogito (in beta) and ZenNote, which I see no one mentioned. For now I settled with ZenNotes because it came with vim motions out of the box. But I'm also liking the Cogito approach, with a much cleaner UI.