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by lostintangent 1633 days ago
Congrats on the release! I _really_ love the simple approach this tool takes. Though personally, I view note taking as “commodity” enough, that I prefer to own my data, and use my existing editor setup. If folks are looking for a productive, yet low-ceremony note taking workflow, GitHub.dev might be worth a look, since it provides the benefits of using Markdown, a GitHub repo, and VS Code, all from the browser: http://aka.ms/githubdev-fun, https://twitter.com/lostintangent/status/1429483662257446916.

I also _really_ like the concept of “spells”, so congrats on this experience as well. It would be interesting to explore implementing the same behavior using GitHub Actions (many of which, probably already exist?), with push/cron triggers. The benefit of that is that you could share your note taking workflow as a repo template, and then others could fork it and be up-and-running without any new accounts/tools/etc.

4 comments

I'm working on local-first OSS for this sort of second brain thing called OpenMemex. The data store is sqlite (wasm/rust frontend) with programmable integrations in mind:

https://github.com/austinvhuang/openmemex

Looks really interesting! Thanks for sharing
This is exactly what I am building. It has vs code editor, markdown, GitHub sync and many more interesting features for developers https://upnotes.io

GitHub.dev is great but I personally prefer to take notes locally without internet affecting my node taking.

This reads like the reply to the Dropbox release.
The Dropbox reply[1] was fully negative, while this one is mostly positive. It also suggested that the business wasn't viable, which this comment does not. Doesn't read like it at all, honestly.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Is cloud storage anywhere near as opinion-inducing as note taking workflows though? :) There are like a dozen new entrants each month, and so it’s probably meaningful for folks to get super clear on their core requirements. Otherwise, you’d spend all your time evaluating tools, as opposed to actually writing.
This has to be one of the most overdone comments on this site -- Not everything even slightly critical of a product is like the dropbox reply.
How do you access your notes on mobile?
It’s a little bit clunky, but you can use GitHub.dev/<repo> on your phone. I do a lot of browsing/quick edits that way, and it works well enough. That said, I also use Working Copy for iOS to sync my notes repo, and will use that sometimes as well.

Personally, I don’t find that I do a lot of “deep writing” on my phone, as opposed to quick recall or in-the-moment scratch padding. So as long as I have a way to access my notes, make quick edits, and then sync them with my laptop (where I’ll do my primary thinking later), then I’m pretty content.

Look into gitjournal if you're storing and editing markdown from git repos: https://gitjournal.io/ It's very nice in my experience.
Yeah GitJournal is great. I used it for a while, and the dev is super responsive and awesome.