Hello :)
There isn’t any community about note taking where I could post my question and no this is not a “What’s the best note taking app” question…
I’m getting tired of maintaining my Obsidian vaults… Somehow I’m fighting to get it right and obsidian seems to fight back. I’ve got 4 vaults of the same subject and I always end to make a mess out of it and make a fresh one… Also my notes a scattered in all direction and the more my knowledge base grows the less I seem to be able to find something…
This is probably a me problem rather than Obsidian issue. The way I’m taking notes are not compatible with Obsidian. IMO Obsidian’s defaults configuration are bad and visually not appealing. Sure customization in Obsidian is “endless” but digging in the HTML code to change the style or adding plugins to somehow get something visually appealing seems more like a chore than actually taking notes.
Here I’m again roaming the web for a Note taking app the could fit my needs and after trying a lot of different apps (please don’t suggest the already well known apps… I have probably already tried it…) I couldn’t find something that fits my workflow.
The only one that looked great and simple was osmosnote but it isn’t maintained anymore. There’s also dendron but it’s in maintenance mode. So there goes the only ones that looked promising from my perspective.
After giving it more thoughts, I was looking for something that could:
- Keep my scripts updated
- Simple markdown text
- No database
- Local first
- Open source
- If webapp self-hostable
- Back-linking
- Keep track of changes
Except for back-linking, a self-hosted Forgejo with git seems to fit all my needs, however I’m not sure if this is the right tool and I’m scared that in the long run I will mess it up the same way I did with Obsidian.
Does anyone here has some experience and is taking notes that way? I’m really curious on your experience and maybe your thoughts if it’s feasible ? Practical ?
Please don’t suggest Org.mode or Emacs ! They look very cool and very promising but they are WAY to much overkill ! And they also implement a totally new way of taking notes… Relearning on how to take notes will probably give me the last hit on abandoning to document anything !
Thank you for any helpful input !
I stumbled on vimwiki years ago and I’ve never found anything that meets my needs better. You can use markdown, link to things, etc. I use git to help manage versions and track changes, but I truly treat it like a wiki where it’s constantly updated and live.
You can easily publish to html too if that’s your thing.
As for searching and other stuff, I use telescope (part of neovim) and grep and other coreutils and bash scripts to do the things I need to do with my stuff. For example I have a vim keyboard that calls a script that greps through my diary notes for “to do” items then puts them in one file for me. But they all link back to the file they reference. So I can quickly see my to do items and jump to that specific note to work out it or close it out.
It’s all text files; no databases or special formats.
If you use md it’s interoperable with a myriad of other apps and tools too.
My blog, for example is a Hugo blog so any personal note that I want to make into a blog post is a ‘cp’ away from publishing.