I had a task to check out Roam notes. I finally got around to completing the task, and I’m glad I did. As I was researching, I ran into Dendron, which is similar to Roam, and I’m hooked.
Roam costs money, I don’t need another bill, and in fact, I’m trying to dump Evernote. Roam is double the cost of Evernote, so that’s a non-starter.
Dendron is free, and it fills my requirements for note-taking.
- Free
- Text-based, to avoid vendor lock-in
- Hierarchical
- Note Linking
- Mobile editing
- Storage in Git
Dendron
Dendron is a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tool that can scale to over 20K notes. It’s a VScode extension that lets me manage my notes while filling all of my requirements.
It supports the following notable features.
- Markdown notes to keep things simple.
- Front Matter to annotate your notes with a title and description.
- Schemas allow you to enforce structure in your notes.
- Workspace and vaults to organize your notes.
- Hierarchies to further organize your notes.
- Graph View to visualize your notes and quickly find them.
It has many other features, and notably, it integrates with tools like Anki to memorize facts.
GitJournal
I needed a way to edit and create notes on the run. I also wanted to save photos to my notes, and lo n’ behold, GitJournal meets both of those requirements.
Conclusion
I’ll update this post as I learn more, but for now, this is a great solution with many other benefits. The markdown based note-taking world is full of colorful tools. Now that my notes are text-based new opportunities will arise regularly.