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 !
FWIW I’m been using PmWiki on https://fabien.benetou.fr/ (and other of my wikis) for a decade now and it covers most of your need (no DB, track change via wiki page history, link and back-links, tons of recipes to extend) but also has some down sides (PHP, even though improved a lot since early 2000, isn’t exactly popular at the moment, own syntax that’s close to markdown yet isn’t it, not the most popular wiki engine and relatively complex). I’m also using my Gitea instances https://git.benetou.fr/
Honestly though I’m not really sharing this as to advocate for PmWiki and/or Gitea but rather to highlight, and even think as I share, that I don’t have a single tool for both. Sometimes I need notes, sometimes I need code repository, sometimes I “just” keep files in my ~/Prototypes directories. I’d love to have a “unified” solution that manages both notes and code but so far it seems each specialized tool, including issues on repository, does a better job. Maybe it’s just the habit. Anyway it brings me to the question to you :
what do you actually expect the unification of those tools would bring?
Edit: I also use NextCloud to edit documents I need across devices or share with others. Same here, I could “just” upload such files (e.g. photos, rich text, spreadsheets) to my wiki as attachment and yet somehow I use this dedicated tool.