HelixNotes is completely free, open source, with no bloat. Your notes should be yours.
So we made sure they are. https://helixnotes.com/
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I like Trilium because:
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Docker based so I can access from a web browser on any device
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Has both WYSIWYG and Markdown note-taking formats
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Can display math symbols in WYSIWYG, essential for anybody studying STEM
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Has a mind graph view to see linked notes in knowledge clusters
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Storage system is intuitive as every note is both a folder and a note, allowing for extremely modular storage
Helix could be cool, but it’s going to take a lot for me to transition off of Trilium now.
Why does it matter if its docker based for remote access?
Docker solves remote access and synchronicity, if I’d have to guess
This looks pretty cool actually. I currently use Affine, are you able to say how Trillium compares?
I’ve never used Affine, so unfortunately no :/
No problem, thanks for replying anyway :)
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I’m using Joplin, sync’d across Nextcloud to my android phone, Linux laptop and Linux desktop.
this do much the same or …better ?
I’ve been looking into Joplin and LogSeq to potentially replace Obsidian. My issue with both of them is that they don’t seem to offer hierarchical organization. I want to split topics into different folders, with sub-topics in sub-folders.
This feature is a must have for me, and OP’s app seems to fulfill that while also being open source (unlike Obsidian). Tbh, it seems like it’s mainly a drop-in replacement for Obsidian (which is good imo) if you’re not using Obsidian’s sync system
I’m doing this about an intermediate step. My notes are all in a GIT repository. So I use GIT to create the synchronization between the different devices. On the smartphone with PuppyGit. Positive side effect: The note app itself does not require synchronization.
How do you commit changes and solve conflicts? Thank you!
Nextcloud syncs great on PC but we’re still working on implementing Webdav which would affect your Android device.
It’ll take a lot for me to move from silverbullet.md but I’m always up for checking out alternatives : D
I’ll give this a spin tonight
Seems quite good - I’ve tried a LOT of MarkDown editors over the years, but until quite recently, I’d stuck with Zettlr for a long time. I’ve recently reinstalled my laptop, which made me look for alternatives to some software, and I’ve been playing round with MarkText for the last few days, which seems nice.
HelixNotes is definitely good - if I had to drop MarkText, I think I could get on well with it. I like that they have a debian repository, so I can keep it updated with the usual system update software. I downloaded the AppImage as a quick test, but it didn’t work because it was compiled against an old version of glibc.
The only thing I don’t like so far is the format toolbar is at the bottom of the editor screen, and I haven’t found a way to move it.
Great suggestion on the movable toolbar. This is definitely something we can add.
Sounds great, look forward to seeing that. After using it a bit more, another thing occurred to me - there’s no way to open arbitrary files. I don’t use MarkDown for “just notes” or “just one thing”, I keep markdown files all over the place. I had set the repository directory to be that of my blog posts during first run, but then I can’t open things in my notes directory or documents folder, and I can’t see anywhere in the settings dialogue to change it. Am I missing something?
Not sure if you can answer this question, but I’ve tried Markdown in the past with Joplin and one of the issues I had with it was that the codeblocks don’t have a convenient copy button. It separates them out nicely but you still have to highlight to copy and paste.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but as far as I could tell, this seemed like a shortcoming of Markdown itself, but is that something helix is able to do? It’s the one thing that’s got me on AnyType over any other note app, but I’m heavily under utilizing it for what it could be good for.
Is there an option to make check boxes for shopping lists? I cant find one.
Edit - yes there is. I found it.
Light mode - what’s wrong with you? /s (but not really).
Im old lol
intriguing
Looks like a cool project, anyone here try it and have an elivator pitch on why this over Joplin?
It seems to have a hierarchical organization system like Obsidian. That’s a big difference imo.
Now, Joplin might have that hidden somewhere, but in that case the fact I can tell this from a glance with HelixNotes and not with Joplin still says something.
Is this obsidian2?
I like obsidian
Without plugins system - no
Looks cool… but as an Obsidian user, i’m uncertain as to the depth of the differentiators. Open source sure, but obsidian has served me well and is lightning fast to open even with all core plug-ins enabled plus several community plug-ins. Nearly all of which are optional anyway.
Obsidian also has quite a moat in terms of third-party functionality enhancements with very feature rich examples like Xcalidraw.
They also offer an end to end encrypted synchronization service that works better than file based synchronization services like iCloud, and a publish service that also works well.
No casting of aspersions, but as a former fortune 500 decision-maker for enterprise software in the millions, I have a tendency to critically think about why X vs Y for my personal stack as well. Counterpoints welcome!
Enshitification.
If they were really committed to keeping it “for the users” they would open source it.
The fact that they haven’t means they are keeping in their back pockets enshitification to drive more users to paid options in case their current investment dries up.
I love FOSS and Obsidian is literally the only close-sourced software in my stack, but open source is not necessary to prevent enshittification, not if you have interoperability. As long as data is stored in md files, if the obsidian team makes bad moves people can pack up and migrate to logseq or other competitors. While the 3rd party plugins add enhancements that might bog down switching, many of those plugins are open source and could be ported.
Was AI used in the process of making this app, and if so, how? I have personal issues with using ‘vibe-coded’ software. This looks very, very nice, so I figured I’d ask.
Thanks for asking. Yes, we use AI as a tool in our workflow. The difference between our workflow and ‘vibe coding’ is that we can catch and fix problems. We’re not just shipping whatever an AI produces and hoping it works.
That’s still rather vague tbh. There’s a pretty big spectrum of how involved an AI gets beyond just letting the AI do everything, and the line between ‘vibe coding’ and not is blurry and changes between individuals.
Are you treating the AI like a glorified StackOverflow/Google to get suggestionsand then manually writing/adapting the code yourself? Are you letting the AI do all the coding and running a lot of tests? Is it something in between or outside those examples?
I’m not trying to string you up, it’s just that communication and disclosure are important in FOSS
Fair point. To be more specific we’re somewhere in between. AI writes a lot of code for us, but there’s a developer in the loop who reads every line and understands what it’s doing. We still make the call on whether it stays unlike the traditional vibe coder who doesn’t know what to look for. Hope that clears things up a bit.
I’ll wait a few months and then check in again.
It stores all metadata in YAML frontmatter and doesn’t cache in an SQLite blob? I bet that decision will be reversed pretty quickly once people try to migrate a 10k+ note collection and want to do operations like search immediately instead of scanning every file to build an in-memory cache.
You’re right that all metadata lives in markdown frontmatter, but it’s not uncached. The notes list also only reads around 2KB frontmatter, so it stays fast well past 10k notes. We do have some tweaks planned though to optimize this even further. This is a great suggestion, thank you!
No vibe coding. No AI. No slop. This is absolutely screaming LLM
The whole website looks like AI.
Also the commit history is only 3 month old and the first commit is 26000 lines. How ever this could be longer in development and commits could be squashed. At this point, I doubt it though.
They could be hosting the source code on github or something like that and changed to couldberg no?
nope, the git history would move with the repo
Depends how you do it. Add a new remote and push, sure. Copy the src into a newly init repo, not so much. Granted there is no reason to do the latter but you could.
This isn’t a guarantee and also assumes the previous version management was git.
He did one big rewritten before because of poor gui speed. I won’t comment on of if he use ai or not or code quality, but you can probably search old posts about his rewritten. I do agree dev should keep his git history less susceptible especially in this ai slop age
the advertising is troubling to me somehow; it has a budget and someone deciding were to spend the money on advertising.
the advertising is troubling to me somehow; it has a budget and someone deciding were to spend the money on advertising.
I’m not being paid to advertise. This is just my contribution to the project.
that’s impressive af; it looks really professional!
Thank you, that’s very kind of you to say!
you should go pro; you clearly already have the skills.
automatically responding that this was created with an LLM? this is absolutely screaming LLM
Huge amount of downvotes. Clearly openclaw orchestrating angent swarm. /s
i see the LLMs have learned to use the “/s” mark!
I’m afraid I won’t be locking the pod bay doors today, Dave.
If - hypothetically - you were trying to convince me that this is better than Notesnook, what would your pitch be?
Since you’re using Notesnook, I’m guessing you strongly care about your privacy and data security. Notesnook encrypts your notes before they leave which is great, but with HelixNotes, there’s nothing to intercept in the first place. Your notes live on your device. You decide if they ever go anywhere. In addition to that, HelixNotes is free with no account creation.
I guess I should specify that I’m selfhosting Notesnook, so the data never leaves my personal device ecosystem, and the central sync server is a big plus for me. No account required either (apart from the ones I create on the server I control).
This looks like the slightly less bloated Logseq/Obsidian I’ve been dying for!
Genuinely curious what bloat does Obsidian come with? But yeah my first thought too was FOSS Obsidian
Electron = bloat. That’s why HelixNotes is Tauri.
Electron runtime in general. It seems all of the popular cross platform note taking / knowledge garden apps are electron.
I long so much for a native version that I started learning QTQuick to do just this.
Til Obsidian is electron, never knew!
Personally I have only a hundred notes or so and really only the basic plugins and it still takes up to 10 seconds to load and become usable on my phone.
It is definitely not fast loading up but it is very fast in most other use cases I have seen. At work I use it with getting more towards 1000 notes and it works fine there usually, though there is some windows+ electron weirdness
