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Hey all, I've methodically used many of the available notetaking apps in the past year- Dynalist, Roam, Remnote, Obsidian, and Siyuan, on top of several years of using Onenote, Evernote, Trilium, and Joplin. The three criteria that I've found to best sum up the notetaking experience are 1) Friction in capturing a new thought 2) Friction in finding a previous thought and 3) How memorable the note structure is. I've found Dendron to have subtle but well throught-out features that gives it a strong balance in these uses, standing out from the rest. Dendron solves the problem of visually organizing notes Ive always had an issue with too many notes with all different titles, creating giant dropdown menus in the sidebars of note apps. My Google Docs documents list needs its own table of contents. It's not an issue anymore because Dendron's organization brings in an X-axis to the formerly single direction binary tree organization, and I've been using that to keep my nav sidebar clean. Dendron's "schema" syntax looks just like the .JSON or .OPML outputted by a mind mapping app. Dendron creates a graph/mindmap not of the individual notes, but of the organization of the notes. So it represents the ontologies and "phylogenies" of knowledge as a map, just like how my mind does. There's something more memorable about navigating to your notes from a map, than from a table of contents or by ctrl-F. Dendron allows you to create new notes that "branches" off the namespace of an existing note. I use this to seperate source material and my own annotations on subjects. It supports my dream of having my own frictionless intranet to take notes on. I use the Markdown Clipper browser extension copy entire webpages into Dendron. When I look up something up on UptoDate.com, a pretty dense medical database, I just copy the whole article into Dendron.
Next time I look up the same topic, I head for my Dendron note, and use link to make my own mental wikipedia out of what I understood out of the information. Then when I want to review a topic, give a presentation, or make a review outline, can reference in my own notes plus the original context where I read the information in the first place. Also, Dendron integrates well with the VSCode to Anki extension. |