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Comment on HelixNotes - a local-first markdown note-taking app (Rust + Tauri, AGPL-3.0)

Your website says “No sync. No lock-in. No bullshit”

Would you mind elaborating on the thought there? Why no sync?

I use obsidian with self hosted live sync, my notes are mine and they live on my hardware, but they are always in sync between my devices. If I’m on my desktop and take notes, I can pull them up on my laptop or even my phone. With this, I can’t reference my notes (or update them) until I’m back on my desktop.

The line “No sync. No lock-in. No bullshit” tells me you’re opposed to it on principal, meaning you don’t intend to ever add the ability to sync, and that’s a nonstarter for me and a lot of people I image. I’d love to migrate from obsidian to something open source, and I’d love to potentially spend time working on contributing a self hosted live sync like feature, but I need to know if my work and pull request will be immediately rejected on a principal I’m not sure I understand?

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ArkHost@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Good question. “No sync” means no built-in cloud sync - not that sync is impossible. Your notes are plain .md files in a folder, so you can sync them with Syncthing, Nextcloud, rsync, Git, or anything else you already use. The app watches the filesystem for external changes and picks them up automatically.

The philosophy is: I don’t decide where your files go. You do.

As for contributions - absolutely welcome. PRs won’t be rejected on principle. If you want to work on a self-hosted sync feature, open an issue on Codeberg and let’s discuss the approach first. I’d love to see it.

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- teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Are there plans for mobile apps? In particular, obsidian and nextcloud don’t seem to work well together on android. Changes made to files via obsidian don’t get picked up by nextcloud unless I manually go sync the file. This might just be nextcloud’s app dropping the ball.
  
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- 3abas@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Sounds good, I’m trying out the app and seeing if I can really use it to replace obsidian, and I might dedicate some time to contribute if I end up using it. I agree with your assessment that obsidian’s customization with its plugin eco system leads to it becoming a side project that you have to baby instead of just a note taking app.
  
  I don’t use a lot of plugins on obsidian, but I use rely on a few that make organizing notes easier, mainly:
  
  Daily notes: I really like being able to click one button to create a note with a date and organized into date folders, these are usually quick notes that reference bigger notes. Not being able to do it with a click means I just won’t do it at all, so my quick notes could very quickly become a giant list of unorganized files in the vault root.
  
  Templates: not a huge deal, I can manually apply templates from a template .md file, but it’s a nice feature.
  
  On sync, two problems with using “whatever” to sync entire vault:
  
  I have to install and configure syncing on every device, and make sure they’re connected
  
  Merge conflict and sync order! I used to use seafile I sync, and I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to lose entire notes because they were overwritten externally.
  
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  - ArkHost@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Great feedback.
    
    Daily notes - not there yet but it’s a straightforward feature to add. I’ll put it on the roadmap.
    
    Templates - same, noted.
    
    Sync conflicts - fair point. HelixNotes watches the filesystem for external changes, but conflict resolution when two devices edit the same note is a real problem with any file-based sync. Syncthing handles this better than most (it creates conflict copies instead of overwriting), but it’s not perfect.
    
    If you end up trying it and want to contribute, open issues on Codeberg for what you’d like to see. Contributions are very welcome.
    
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    3abas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Oh, forgot to ask, are mobile apps on the roadmap?
    
    Obviously your chosen tech stack makes that difficult, but notes on the go are pretty essential.
    
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vext01@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I assume you could use syncthing to sync the notes.

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