If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app (2 for open source note taking app), I'd be set on rent money for a few months. What about note taking makes people want to invent their own app? Is it just bikeshedding? Spending hours writing a note taking app sounds like a perfect way to not end up taking notes and to not use said notes to accomplish much.
Athens is pretty far behind most alternatives. I use logseq.com and it is miles ahead of Athens and even edges out Roam in a lot of aspects. i.e. it’s based in md and org-mode and all data is stored locally and synced with GitHub. The team is great and super responsive (minutes from message to new deploy) and are open sourcing after beta. They took all the best features of all the trendy note taking apps and put it into one beautiful piece of clojure web app. Super recommend!
This doesn't seem ready for use yet. Another Roam alternative I've been using that seems pretty much complete and has the benefit of letting the user host the data is<p><a href="https://obsidian.md/" rel="nofollow">https://obsidian.md/</a>
It seems to me that the reason note taking is complex, and so fractured, is because of lack of label support in OS's. Data is mismanaged at the data level, and we are looking for solutions to that problem with applications rather than at the OS level where it belongs.<p>The file tree idea, where a file exists in only one place in the hierarchy is wrong. I'd rather all my notes/files were in one big bucket, but that I could label each, and then sort by labels.<p>I may want to label a file as 'software', 'tech-architecture' and 'finance' - all of them. When I look up any one of those labels, I want to get all the related content. I shouldn't need to guess which bucket I put a note into. So, I say labels should be data associated to files like modified date, or author.<p>To fix the problem of 'no label' as part of the data, I try to use a note taking that applies labels for me. But then an app developer is going to want to do all sorts of extra stuff.<p>I understand that having tons of label data on the file could become ridiculous though. Perhaps the real answer would be to have a hidden metadata file associated with the data itself (eg 'mytext.txt.meta') - labels and any other metadata would go in here, separate to the note 'mytext.txt' itself.<p>So, I think OS's enforce a data organisational structure on us that is unnatural to the way we think and work. And we seek to fix it with apps. And we will never get satisfaction that way :(
I think graph/network based notes are really interesting and I'm keen to see how Athens develops.<p>I've created my own open source approach called Very Nested [1] that uses GitHub repos for storage. It also supports files and images.<p>So far, I've enjoyed organising my recipes [2] with it.<p>Feedback welcome, it's new.<p>[1] <a href="https://verynested.cadell.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://verynested.cadell.dev/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://cooking.cadell.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://cooking.cadell.dev/</a>
<a href="https://joplinapp.org/" rel="nofollow">https://joplinapp.org/</a> is a very nice tool in this space as well. Open source, lots of features.
I've recently picked up Notion and I like it a lot. I looked into Roam but for $15 per month and with a lot of performance issues, I think I'll pass for now. I'm hoping they work out the quirks because the idea of being able to quickly link different concepts together is pretty neat. Fortunately Notion has backlinks which work for most of my needs and the blocks look nicer.
I've tested a lot of those note taking app, Athens does not seem to be particularly better than the rest.<p>My the most favorite app is <a href="https://www.zettlr.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.zettlr.com</a>. It has a simple concept that I really like: this is just markdown files viewer that has ability to: (1) edit (2) search(also by tags) and (3) link files. And that's all.<p>Files are stored on a local disc in any folder structure someone wants, can be sync using whatever someone wants - Google Drive, Dropbox, Synology NAS, etc.<p>There is zero vendor lock-in, as it works on plain MD files without any custom elements.<p>This is one more Electron app, however in that case it is not especially annoying, there are some lags, but acceptable.
I have recently started using Fsnotes [1]. Its based on nvAlt [2]. If we are focusing on networked notes, fsnotes supports it out of the box and best part, it is offline; stores files as markdown on my local machine, which I really want. Not sure if Roam or Athens are offline apps, didn't dig too much into them.<p>[1] <a href="https://fsnot.es/" rel="nofollow">https://fsnot.es/</a>
[2] <a href="https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/" rel="nofollow">https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/</a>
Foam is another <a href="https://foambubble.github.io/foam/" rel="nofollow">https://foambubble.github.io/foam/</a>
Athens story is quite compelling : <a href="https://www.notion.so/MVP-Update-Funding-and-Why-I-Started-Athens-e68822f0c3654660ae621cdcbf932bc4" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.so/MVP-Update-Funding-and-Why-I-Started-A...</a>
Tried most of them, Bear, DEVONThink, Foam, Quiver, Notion, Obsidian, Org-Mode, Roam, Workflowy, and Zettlr to name a few.
The feature I found to be the best is the "outliner with zoom" from Roam and Workflowy. With that in mind, Dynalist (<a href="https://dynalist.io/" rel="nofollow">https://dynalist.io/</a>) is what I'm currently using.
I'm super excited to see an open source approach to these! Frankly I probably won't use it because I like the plain-text-files approach to note-taking, but when I evaluate new options, being open source and self-hosted are very important factors for me (specifically in the personal knowledge management space).