Your project looks cool! Always interesting to see how other people tackle note-taking. Thanks for keeping it open source.
I'd encourage people to check out Notabase as well, which offers an alternative vision and UI which some people might like better. You can use it hosted, or self-host it yourself -- the code is open source [2].
Best of luck with MdSilo! :)
[1]: https://notabase.io
Not really "self-hosted", then.
Besides, if you know how to code, it's simple to change the max number of notes to something like Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY anyway - but adding a row in the database is likely easier so that's what I recommend.
It may be a bit of a hassle, but I do this because the codebase for the hosted version and the self-hosted version is the same, which makes it easier for me to maintain. In the future, I may make a separate self-hosted version so that this step can be skipped.
Not really an option to do otherwise, thanks to the license (AGPL).
- Acts as a GUI to manage markdown files which live on your system
- Works well as a dump of info
- Gives you features such as search and tag handling to your MD files
I feel like I have tried all the notes apps and this is the best for me by far. The editor mentioned in this thread is "Roam like" which is great, but I like something a bit more "lo-fi" in that it's basically just a manager for plain text files. I feel the functionality of "Roam like" is distracting because I think about things like "where should I put this" or "what title should I give this?" Also distracting is that they feel too much like a "no-node" platform on which I find myself building an application. In Obsidian, I name files as numbers based on date and then discover them via a hierarchy of tags and through search. Since the files are already on my system, I can also use other applications to manage or search these files.
Excited to introduce mdSilo on Hacker News, it is a Zettelkasten note-taking app runs entirely in your web browser, free and open source.
We believe connection is good in thinking. mdSilo supports [[BackLinks]], ((Block Reference)) to connect everything in writing. On top of that, we also believe that the digital garden is better not a walled garden. So mdSilo opens a window and builds a bridge for each digital garden. We can connect with each other via {{ PubLink }}. Just like links to liaison points between private digital gardens, a liaison point can be a shared wiki page of any systematic knowledge generated from different digital gardens spontaneously.
Here are some of the features that mdSilo offers:
- WYSIWYG editor, Markdown support, Live Preview like Typora;
- PWA and Local File System Access support to make it functions as same as native app on desktop;
- Side menu, Hovering toolbar, hotkeys, Slash command to make writing and formatting fun;
- #HashTag and nested notes to help organize your writing;
- View your writing in different ways: Page Stacking View, Graph view, Chronicle view, Task view...;
- Connect everything in your writing by BackLink, Block Reference, Direct/Indirect Mentions, etc.;
- Import or export your notes at any time as Markdown files or Json;
- Full-text search;
Like an online IDE, mdSilo is a vscode.dev for notes, a good free and open source alternative to Obsidian, Roam Research and more.
mdSilo puts privacy first. No registering is required, no installation is required, You are writing locally, you fully own and control your data even the code(it is open source, anyone can inspect it and make it even better together).
Official site and demo: https://mdsilo.com/ The source code repo: https://github.com/danloh/mdSilo-web
I cannot see any instructions on how run it locally?
Has anything with the format changed since the fork that would prevent people from moving data between them?
The biggest difference between Notabase or any other networked note-taking apps is that we introduced a new feature: {{ PubLink }}.
try it out for more details.
I enjoyed reading the documentation that's in the live preview however the part explaining this feature left me wondering exactly how it works and what it is used for.
Another thing I wasn't sure about was the Workspace feature. When I tap on New Workspace I am not sure how to switch back to the old one. Is it possible to switch among workspaces?
Worth reiterating that the live demo/help docs are great. Nice work!
short answer: PubLink just like BackLink, but it links to a public wiki note instead of a private note.
new workspace is just to open new mdSilo app on a new tab. it is OK for you to switch among the tabs?
I plan to prepare a more detailed docs in live demo soon.
> There's a subset of this API we're quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read/write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user's local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.
The GitHub issue discussing this position is now closed [1].
[0] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s... [1] https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/#security-ransomwa...
The note-taking market is very crowded. I think note-taking has already delivered its original slice bread. Pretty difficult to continue to reinvent the same and expect a different result. However, I do think, that going back to the basics of HTML (instead of continuing with the markdown) may break the ceiling a little further.
Any case. Good luck with your offering. It looks good and acts well.
Depending on how you spread the word about MdSilo, that may not be a problem. If it is a problem, though, you may wish to address it.
I've been using Obsidian to keep my Japanese dictionary clip, so I did a quick test.
The import feature is working well, the .md renders perfectly.
But somehow, pasting is not working normally:
- Pasting into empty note is not working at all.
- If I type anything, then select it then paste, I can paste my clipboard into it, but urls are missing.
This is what I paste: https://www.toptal.com/developers/hastebin/nuhavenuge.md
BTW, I'm wondering how well does the graph view performs when there are, like, 1000+ notes?
Yes, Pasting Markdown does not work currently. need to do some investigation.
It can handle 1000+ notes, may depends on computer performance.
[[BackLinks]] seem to be common in the md-knowledge-base space, less so (()) and {{}}. I'd prefer standard markdown links with support from the editor to insert them faster and add backlinks and stuff like that.
Another non-standard-markdown markup which Logseq allows is ^^highlighting text^^. However, this is something I miss at pure markdown.
The compromise is perfected as Logseq allows to remove those special markup for exporting content and using it elsewhere (e.g. as Pandoc input).
Don't know how MdSilo will handle this.
Thanks for distributing the fork and contributing to the note taking apps landscape!
if you prefer mdSilo, need to toggle the Offline mode false in code and use the third-part services: vercel and supabase
Will tackle this issue, Thanks
How do I run it locally/on my server?
Is it possible to make some of my notes public but RO?
no Publish feature currently, we can hope it in the future. you can export your works as plain text Markdown files.
Having had only a short view on MdSilo I'm not able to distinguish all similarities or differences. Logseq is clearly defined as an outliner (every block is a bullet point) but all the other features look pretty similar.
Especially that Logseq as well as MdSilo are living in (chromium-alike) browsers working on local files (accessible as plain text) is a feature which I can't underline enough as this allows to use your notetaking environment idependently of user privileges.
Is anybody able to add something for a contrasting juxtaposition? With now 1000+ pages generated during heavy usage of Logseq during the last weeks it is unlikely for me to switch but might be helpful for other users.
Indirect Mentions seem to be worth a closer look. Do we see this feature in Logseq as well?
