Haptic: A new local-first, privacy-focused and open-source home for your markdown notes

Sunny' 🌻@slrpnk.net to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 7 points – GitHub - chroxify/haptic: A new local-first, privacy-focused and open-source home for your markdown notes
github.com

This seems like a solid choice for those of use looking for a obsidian-like replacement. Personally tried all editors out there, but nothing is able to defeat my love for obsidian. However, i look forwards to trying out Haptic when it comes to Linux. Currently it only supports Web and Mac. But state Linux and Windows support is on-the-way.

Kudos to selfh.st that provides consistent updates within this community and who shared this among other cool projects this week -> https://selfh.st/newsletter/2024-09-06/?ref=this-week-in-self-hosted-newsletter

24

I tried every single proprietary and open source , even self host , markdown notes apps. Obsidian is … just, i always go back to it. I have it with the plugin “Remotely Save”, synced encrypted with OneDrive. It just works, every fucking where with its own app. solid as a petrified dump

Have you tried trilium notes? Not as hyped and polished, but does extraordinarily well IME.

I'm early onto my journey with this and tossing between logseq and obsidian. Thoughts?

You need to list out your requirements. What do you want to do? Where do you need your data? Do you care about open source? Self-hosting? Do you have an idea how your content will be organized? Will you ever need to tap into it as data? Etc

I have notes fairly sporadically all over the place. Some for work for compartmentalised projects that I won't need to see again once the project is done. Then for personal creative projects. Then for personal research projects. I like tracking data for sure. I'd prefer to have one central place for everything. I like things organised and get very into organisation but I'd love some kind of AI organisation element. Not sure either of these do that though. I do have my own server and like self hosting. I do care about foss but will sometimes choose a more appropriate tool over a foss one. I need the data on my phone and accessible either on a cloud or syncable or something. I'm currently dipping my toe into Obsidian with syncthing/Dropbox. I won't pay for any monthly fees but don't mind paying one off payments.

I think you should give Trilium(Next) Notes a try:

  • it has the hierarchical notes structure that you are familiar with in obsidian

  • it has better ways of keeping things organized (attributes can be values or references, can be shared and inherited, which provides a flexible framework for having notes "types" as templates that can be extended, e.g. people vs. colleagues, businesses vs. companies, etc)

  • it has the concept of note hoisting (which lets you focus on a note and its sub-notes, so other projects/spaces don't come in the way of autocomplete and placing references), and workspaces that builds further on top of that

  • it can be used standalone (local client/offline-only, like obsidian) but coupling it with a remote-server opens more interesting use-cases (synching, sharing notes with others by public URLs, one-user/multi-client editing) which gives the best of both worlds (local-first/online-first) and lets you access your personal notes on devices you don't necessarily own (which obsidian doesn't). The mobile app story isn't great (it's a PWA with limited offline capabilities at the moment), but isn't worse than the alternatives either (I can't really work and think long form on a handheld, no matter the editor experience, but perhaps that's just me).

Iiiinteresting, I'll give it a spin, thank you for the recco!

Obsidian is just sooooo good. I hate that you (technically 😉) have to pay for multi device sync, but the UI and UX are excellent, especially if you're already proficient in markdown

Haven't tried logseq before, so I can't compare

How else do you get multi device sync?

My current solution is to use syncthing to handle syncing the files, but I have to debug a permissions error that pops up.

I didn't like obsidian's lacking in attributes structuring/typing and the fact that it cannot serve over a web UI (for wherever you cannot install the heavy client or just to share notes via URL), and found trilium notes to be doing that perfectly, and much much more. Highly recommend.

Any comparisons to SilverBullet.md? It's my favorite so far

How do you like the newer versions? I liked it in the beginning, but then there were breaking changes and new concepts and it started to feel a bit too complicated. So I am taking a break until things cool down

I like it, it seems pretty stable to me. I didn't use it much before the query/template stuff was changed. I think both are fine right now, but don't really know what it looked like before.

There's also "space-script" now which is basically like mini javascript plugins you can write inside your notes. It's what drew me away from trilium in the end.

I don't blame you for taking a break if you ran into breaking changes though. That's one benefit to keeping your notes in regular markdown files too.

yes, regular markdown notes has been a good decision 😅

In the beginning, the query results were stored in the markdown files, which could be useful if reading them in another app. But now I just get the query code. I think there were reasons

I'm glad to hear things have cooled down. Does it take much effort to understand and use the templating stuff? I just remember templates got pushed to a different view, and I needed some header tags to get it working

So you like spaces or not? I never got that far with silverbullet. And I haven't used Trillium. I loved evernote when it came out. But it made me aware of the value of maintaining my own data.

Now I try to have data in a directory structure and not in databases

What issues did you have? I have updated recently and didnt notice any problems so far. Also do you have any suggestion for alternatives? For me personally silverbullet is great for desktop usage, not so much on mobile though.

What mobile issues do you have? I use it both on desktop and mobile with sync mode turned on in the PWA.

I don't really have any issue for what the software is supposed to do. I can access my instance, read and edit, templates and queries work fine.

But overall the user experience is not so good on mobile. On desktop it is really easy to navigate my notes, specially so because of the great support for keyboard shortcuts. Now for mobile it doesnt feel too good. Navigation works but the interface is too small - making tapping a bit clunky. I also find it uncomfortable to use for to do lists - things like groceries lists that I need on the go. Sometimes toggling works fine if touch but sometimes it switches to view mode.

I really dont think any of that is an issue with the software itself. Its just the format I guess? I still use silverbullet and Ive never tried anything as good for organizing work stuff. But I still wish something more "native" for android.

I am not thinking of the most recent versions.

The query system was updated, around version 0.6 if i remember correctly. I don't think the updates were bad, but some things broke and I am too old for "bleeding edge". The template system was also updated at some point

I don't have a great solution. I use syncthing to keep notes local on all devices and MarkText on desktop and Zettel Notes on android.

what i really liked about silverbullet was that it had offline support. but there were made some changes there as well along the way, and for me it became less stable after it became optional. But I haven't actively used it for some time. I still got an instance running tho

My dream is something that can take a stack of markdown files with relative links and generate a static site from them. This is embarrassingly difficult. Right now I think that the GitHub Pages Ruby Gem is the best way but it has too many assumptions about being in a GitHub repository to work. Vanilla Jekyll is nice but I don't want to deal with a bunch of configs to get the experience I want.

As soon as one of these Obsidian alternatives has real-time collaboration and a mobile interface, I'm ready to switch.

The real power of obsidian is similar to why Raspberry Pi is so popular, it has such a large community that plugins are amazing and hard to duplicate.

That being said, I use this to live sync between all my devices. It works with almost the same latency as google docs but its not meant for multiple people editing the same file at the same time

https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync