I'm considering exploring other systems besides Roam, which is the only thing I've used so far and got overwhelmed by the number of choices. Which one of these projects are well loved by the HN community / why?
You don't choose between them. You just infinitely juggle all of them.<p>I'm currently on a 6 month streak with Logseq. A daily journal by default with inline todo's is exactly what I need right now. But when a project puts me in a different mode of operation, maybe I'll go back to categorical notes.<p>The one thing I will never do is put my data somewhere I can't get to it easily. This is why Notion is a no-go for me; it's an instant lock in.
For simple daily notes I always come back to Zim wiki, with git<p>WYSIWYG, you have to enable plugins that come by default.
Journal, Alt-d, creates a file for the day<p><a href="https://zim-wiki.org" rel="nofollow">https://zim-wiki.org</a><p>But it depends, your needs.
I would say Obsidian also looks good<p>Works offline, and without;
Markdown files folder;
Healthy plugin ecosystem;
Firefox/Chrome plugins;
Less web appy than others
I just tried using a whole bunch of them as daily drivers, one by one.<p>- I didn't give Joplin a fair shot; something about the UI annoyed me. I only used it for a few minutes, but it seemed clunky.<p>- Logseq's outline style isn't how I take notes.<p>- Foam was good, but had a lot of small papercuts.<p>- FSNotes was close, but I liked the more basic note format that other apps have, and it didn't have a note graph.<p>- Obsidian is where I settled for work stuff. It has the best live markdown editor of anything I tried. Daily notes are great. I liked inline notes while evaluating it, but now I never use them. The plugin system seems like a bit of a security nightmare, so I use as few plugins as possible.<p>- Standard Notes is what I use for personal notes. Barebones feature set and the editing UIs leave something to be desired. But it's open source and e2e encrypted, so I feel okay about putting anything in it and using it to sync notes between my PC and phone.
I tried Joplin but it has a weird way of actually encoding the notes and obfuscates them a little bit in terms of their naming.<p>Logseq I didn't enjoy it all because it really forces you to represent everything in terms of hierarchical list which was too opinionated for my taste.<p>I ultimately settled on Obsidian because it doesn't make any modifications and you can just throw it at a huge folder of markdown notes. The ability to add CSS snippets and js plug-ins is an extra bonus.
I tried most of these and settled on a something that is offline, non-electron and fast enough: QOwnNotes (<a href="https://www.qownnotes.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.qownnotes.org/</a>)<p>Some highlights:<p>1. markdown support (with preview)<p>2. plain text editing<p>3. hierarchical notes<p>4. keyboard accessibility<p>5. decent plugins (plantuml integration among others)<p>6. note folders (separate workspaces)<p>7. responsive dev team<p>8. nextcloud integration
Easy: Foam isn't standalone, Trilium never heard of. Joplin seems garbage, and Logseq is a walking data stability bug.<p>Roam and Obsidian are the best options, I chose Obsidian because back in the day they had a mobile app and Roam didn't. Now Roam has one too.
I started using Roam because it seemed neat, and then I switched to Notion because it seemed neat. I've stuck with Notion because it's good for planning D&D campaigns.<p>...That's kind of the extent of my thought process.
I didn't, I still use Emacs with org-mode and org-roam, saving searchs and wrapping everything I need through org-ql, while having in place what Emacs' ecosystem has to offer.
I use Logseq because it is just a local-first version of Roam Research.<p>To those who haven't used Roam Research or Logseq or anything similar, you are missing some really good stuff.