Note Taking Inside of VS Code
1 points • 0 comments
@kevinslin
From 12/27/2013, 11:59:06 PM till now, @kevinslin has achieved 728 Karma Points with the contribution count of 180.
Recent @kevinslin Activity
I find that the biggest aspect for development is keeping track of information (eg. documentation, tasks, playbooks, etc) Dendron (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dendron....) is a note taking tool for developers - its open source, built on plaintext markdown, and integrated with VSCode. You can use it to manage your own personal knowledge base and to document your code base.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Dendron. We recently did a Launch HN post where you can find more details on what we're building: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176158
thanks for the kind words :)
Our beachhead market is to compete with tools like confluence to be the knowledge base for technical teams. To that end, we're building a managed backend for Dendron that will make it possible to sync your notes with teammates, provide a web ui, access control, private notes, and other team features.
More details in our public handbook -> https://handbook.dendron.so/notes/f6d9bc09-04b7-4a02-a6aa-a2...
we actually have a solution in the works - adding a human friendly URL label followed by the guid (eg. wiki.dendron.so/notes/tutorial-{guid}) server side, we only parse the last component of the url which will be the guid. the reason we don't do this now is because we're focused on making static publishing smooth (most people use github pages to host their dendron sites) before we start on work on the server enhanced solution
I was a big user of tiddly wiki back in the day and a fan of the work. One point of distinction for Dendron - we are hierarchy oriented but support other means of organization (tags, backlinks, graphs, etc).
If you're trying to create a model of the real world, you probably want to use a graph primitive to capture the nuances. But that flexibility is what makes things hard for humans - since a note can exist in N places, how do you find it? How do you even know you've tagged/linked it correctly?
Dendron's constraint of hierarchy is one of those "its not a bug but a feature" things - the constraint of hierarchy makes it easy for humans to reason about. What we add on top of that is the ability to refactor that hierarchy when necessary
You're right, there is overlap in the sense that both Dendron and Foam are open source note taking tools based around vscode and markdown. Dendron differs in our focus on structure - while we support backlinks, wikilinks, and tags, the primary way of navigating notes in Dendron is by hierarchy which can be described by schemas (our type system for note hierarchies). We provide extensive tooling around traversing and manipulating this structure (lookup, refactoring, etc)
For a more detailed breakdown, you can see the foam vs dendron page here -> https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/p5fMTi-6zOyX1TwhL6dM0.html
short answer - yes. we plan on enabling this, optimistically end of the year, or beginning of next year at the latest
Got it. Yeah this was something that was subject to internal soul searching. The landing page for Dendron was our wiki for the majority of its existence -> https://wiki.dendron.so/ We hired a design firm to make it pop but then went too far in the other direction. When we have cycles, we'll take another stab at finding a happy medium.
Yep. Developer tooling has been making massive strides over the last six decades, all focused on the problem of making information (aka code) easier to manage. Dendron builds on top of this and applies it notes.
In terms of the compiler analogy to notes, in Dendron, this is the schema (aka type) system we use to help users define the structure of their notes: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75c...
Could you elaborate? You mean how animations are tied to scrollevents? (our web team might be influenced by the apple landing page...)
that is how Dendron currently works. But VSCode supports WYSIWYG functioanlity inline. You can see an example of it here: https://github.com/tejasvi/markless we're planning on implementing something similar soon!
thanks! we try to be both compatible and open about everything we do. more details on that in our handbook -> https://handbook.dendron.so/
VSCode (or vscode compatible IDEs) is the main interface for Dendron. that being said, we do expose a CLI for a large subset of features and will ship and web version early next year!
No apologies necessary :)
so we have the split preview today (edit in one window, preview in another). vscode supports combining the two using either webviews or custom editors. you can see an example of that here -> https://github.com/tejasvi/markless
we're planning on implementing a similar featureset
so a couple of things you can do.
dendron creates a `dendron.yml` file and a `dendron.code-workspace` file when you initialize a dendron workspace. if you're in a different vscode workspace, as long as one of the folders has a `dendron.yml` file, then dendron will treat that subdirectory as your dendron workspace.
moving forward, we're looking to support the concept of a `global workspace` that you can access anywhere
resizing can be done using our image syntax. eg. `{max-width: 300px}`. no support for cropping from inside dendron though I'm almost sure there's at least one vscode extension that can do that
obsidian is a great app and they have an excellent mobile client. if you ever want to explore the structural components of Dendron while using Obsidian, you can as we interop on most features
Awesome, let me know how it goes. We have an obsidian to dendron guide here -> https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f9b4fc21-7613-4c8a-9257-cec4c0...
builtin support currently for images - we have a command to insert a copied image into an asset folder and link to it in Dendron. we also have custom syntax for controlling image styling (https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49fe-8164-a17acd...)
for other assets, we current recommend that you drop into the assets folder and link to them. vscode provides a bunch of extensions that let you preview different assets (eg. mp4, pdf, etc)
site design / logo © 2022 Box Piper