Incoming links: WYSIWYG
Lists:
- www.bibsonomy.org/user/bshanks/education fantastic list, presumably by this guy:
- www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/168cmca/which_note_taking_app_for_a_luhmann_zettlekasten/
- www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/18vvavl/best_free_notetaking_app_switching_from_evernote/
- github.com/topics/note-taking has a billion projects. Oops.
- www.noteapps.ca/
Personal knowledge base recommendation threads:
TODO look into those more:
- roamresearch.com/ no public graphs
- nesslabs.com/roam-research-alternatives a bunch of open source alternatives to it
- Trillium Notes. Notable project! Pun unintended!
- Stroll giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html. How to publish? How to see tree?
- tiddlyroam joekroese.github.io/tiddlyroam/ graph rather than text searchable ToC. Public instance? Multiuser?
- Athens github.com/athensresearch/athens rudimentary WYSIWYG
- Logseq github.com/logseq/logseq no web interface/centralized server?
- itsfoss.com/obsidian-markdown-editor. Closed source. They have an OK static website publication mechanism: publish.obsidian.md/ram-rachum-research/Public/Agents+aren't+objective+entities%2C+they're+a+model but leaf node view only for now, no cross source page render. They are committed to having plaintext source which is cool: twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792
- But no upvotes/topics. Favorites could be used as upvotes, but it does not seem like you can favorite other people's work. It's just not their focus, will never be.They have an education push: www.notion.so/product/notion-for-education but it's likely hopeless.
- CherryTree github.com/giuspen/cherrytree written in C++, GTK, WYSIWYG
- github.com/dullage/flatnotes: Python
- github.com/usememos/memos: Go
- github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan: Go
- github.com/vnotex/vnote: C++
- github.com/Laverna/laverna: JavaScript
- github.com/taniarascia/takenote
- github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet: TypeScript, Markdown, web-based WYSIWYG, focus on querying
Major downsides that most of those personal knowledge databases have:
- very little/no focus on public publishing, which is the primary focus of OurBigBook.com
- either limited or no multiuser features, e.g. edit protection and cross user topics
- graph based instead of tree based. For books we need a single clear ordering of a tree. Graph should come as a secondary thing through tags.
Closed source dump:
- www.toodledo.com
- Simplenote: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplenote, by WordPress.com operator company Automattic
Bad:
- no browser-only editor, it's just a local app apparently:
- help.obsidian.md/Getting+started/Sync+your+notes+across+devices they do have a device sync mechanism
These people have good intentions.
The problem is that they don't manage to go critical because there's to way for students to create content, everything is manually curated.
You can't even publicly comment on the textbooks. Or at least Ciro Santilli hasn't found a way to do so. There is just a "submit suggestion" box.
This massive lost opportunity is even shown graphically at: cnx.org/about (archive) where there is a clear separation between:Maybe this wasn't the case in their legacy website, legacy.cnx.org/content?legacy=true, but not sure, and they are retiring that now.
- "authors", who can create content
- "students", who can consume content
Thus, OurBigBook.com. License: CC BY! So we could re-use their stuff!
By Rice University.
TODO what are the books written in?
- github.com/openstax/openstax-cms Uses Wagtail CMS. So presumaby they just Wagtail's WYSIWYG.
- github.com/openstax/os-webview
These are websites that offer somewhat overlapping services, many of which served inspirations, and why we think something different is needed to achieve our goals.
Notably, OurBigBook is the result of Ciro Santilli's experiences with:OurBigBook could be seen as a cross between those three websites.
- Wikipedia
- GitHub
- Stack Exchange (or as non techies might point out, Urban Dictionary, or Quora before it was such an incomprehensible shitshow)
Quick mentions:
- handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About: technically the same as Wikipedia, but with more aligned moderation policies
- ecotext.co/ similar goals. Their website seems quite broken now though as of 2021, can't see text properly. Crunchbase entry: www.crunchbase.com/organization/ecotext says they are from Durham, New Hampshire, United States. Cannot see how to publish, curated material only? Twitter: twitter.com/ecotextinc?lang=en One of the founders: twitter.com/BigNel_21 | www.linkedin.com/in/ecotextnelsonthomas/. Their LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ecotext/people/
- fiveable.me/ bad: separates students and teachers, as a student I don't see where to create my content. Good: focus on teaching university level stuff to people outside of university via Advanced Placement. Bad: Lots of video content. Bad: Can't see the issue tracker attached to each page.
- LessWrong: their website system does have some similar feature sets to what we want. Reputation, Q&A sections, links between articles most likely, sort by upvote everywhere.
- crowdpub.org collaborative writing website, somehow goes to paragraph level, TODO how they reconcile different authors? Closed beta as of writing, so hard to be sure. From quick presentation on beta website, appears to attempt to share revenue to authors proportionally to the size of their contribution. Some blockchain-based reputation. Meh.
- TODO migrate all from: github.com/booktree/booktree/blob/master/alternatives.md
- studynotes.ie/. Admin approval on everything. No ToC. Fixed tag list for university entry exams topics.
- mindstone.com: there appears to be no sharing focus? File upload basesd? Not sure.
- EverybodyWiki
- looking for open source Confluence-alternatives is an interesting way to go:
- lists:
- BookStack:
- fixed 3-level page hierarchy
- writen in PHP
- Markdown support: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/markdown-editor/
- no source-level import-export apparently: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/, youtu.be/WUvtzJfCAKE?t=904
- WYSIWYG: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/wysiwyg-editor/ via TinyMCE
- page content repeating: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/reusing-page-content/ (will be useful for course modelling)
- github.com/shuding/nextra converts Markdown links to Next.js links. We should look into how it works.
- zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ "The Archive" from zettelkasten.de/. Closed source. By German software engineer Christian Tietze twitter.com/ctietze?lang=en
- LLM generated wiki e.g.:
- docs.tigyog.app/cli beautiful website, but doesn't achieve much. Has a Markdown upload mechanism. Ah, those newbs who think the average user will care about markup upload to DB... Oh, wait...
- www.stuvia.com/en-gb/school/uk/oxford-university/physics. PDF uploads. In theory you have to own copyright: www.stuvia.com/en-gb/copyright/guidelines but it feels unlikely that most material was uploaded by the copyright owners. If those people are up, then why can't we? Maybe... Registred in the UK. People: some Dutch dudes:
- Project Xanadu: crazy overlaps, though that project is vaporware apparently?
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
Static website-only alternatives:
- quarto.org/
- vitepress.dev. vitepress.dev/guide/markdown unmanaged internal links. Sample website: wiki.nikiv.dev/.
Conceptual:
- The Final Encyclopedia: science fiction concept, but the name was reused by Paul Allen in a research project
- second brain
- collective intelligence
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free books that anyone can write to get famous.
Live website: ourbigbook.com
Further information and rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
The project's mission is one of, or perhaps the most important, life objective of Ciro Santilli. Reproductive goals aside. These two types of goal are incommensurable. This is one of the great challenges of life.
This is ongoing project.
Ciro's goals in advertising this half done project are is partly to obtain some feedback, and partly to give the idea to someone else who might help push it further, be it in this stack or not.
Better editing support is a must, likely WYSIWYG.
But besides that, it is already in broad strokes the best approach Ciro Santilli can come up with to try and reach the mission statement only with technical advances, i.e. without large amounts of money or political influence which Ciro Santilli does not have.
Maybe that website isn't enough of a technical advance to reach its mission. Maybe there is some further not yet imagined technical insight that would push it into viability. Maybe not. But one must try. Only God can know the answer to these questions.
As of 2022, Ciro has spent about 2.5 years full time working on this project. First he spent about 1 year in 2014 on the first iteration: github.com/booktree/booktree, a GitLab fork, but then decided it was not the way to go.
Then around 2021 he put in some more 1.5 year of full time work, now with a possibly overly complicated (or perhaps just insane/immature) Next.js/Sequelize from scratch website stack.
It makes Ciro a bit ashamed to see that "so little user visible stuff was achieved in so much time". It is partly because he and many people underestimate the difficulty of web development. Perhaps there were some bad stack/useless feature choices issues. And a good dose of indulging in studying the natural sciences to bootstrap content and have fun. But really trying is the only way to learn.
Added
ourbigbook --format-source automatic code formatting. I implemented it for the following reasons:- I want to do certain automatic modifications to source code on web, e.g.:
- allow users to select the parent article of a new article on the web UI, but that is currently doable only with
\Includemacros - allow users to edit the source only for a specific header
- allow users to select the parent article of a new article on the web UI, but that is currently doable only with
- later on, much later, this will allow WYSIWYG export to plaintext
This also ended up having one unexpected benefit: whenever a new feature is added that deprecates an old feature, by converting the large corpus from github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io to the new feature I can test the new preferred feature very well.
For example, converting
\x[blue cat] en masse to the new insane syntax <blue cat> found several bugs with the new insane syntax.This seemed somewhat easy at first, so I started it as a way of procrastinating more urgent Web features (web scares me, you know), but it ended being insanely hard to implement, because there are many edge cases. Also, most bugs are not acceptable, as they would corrupt your precious source code and potentially output.
But well, it is done!
Editor. As last time. And the one before. But now it is for real.
I guess ended up doing all the "how things should look like" features because they clarify what the website is supposed to do, and I already have my own content to bring it alive via
ourbigbook --web upload.But now I honestly feel that all the major elements of "how things should look like" have fallen into place.
And yeah, nobody else is never going to contribute as things are! WYSIWYG is a must.
I was really impressed by Trillium Notes. I should have checked it long ago. The UI is amazing, and being all Js-based, could potentially be reused for our purposes. The project itself is a single-person/full trust notetaking only for now however, so not a direct replacement to OurBigBook.
Tree based organization at last. Infinitely deep.
Amazing WYSIWYG, including maths and tables, plus insane plugins like canvas mode, and specific file formats like code/mermaid diagrams/drawing mode.
Version history with automatic snapshots at intervals. TODO how is it implemented? Do they just ZIP multiple versions?
No multiuser features. Except for that, could have been a good starting point of an online multiuser thing such as OurBigBook.com!
With Book Notes it is possible possible to see more than one page at a time on the output, whic his a major feature of OurBigBook. But does it show on HTML export as well?
You can static HTML export any subtree by right clicking on it in the navigation tree.
Is there a CLI to export to HTML? github.com/zadam/trilium/issues/3012
HTML export keeps all data as HTML is their native format. This may be inherited from CKEditor. The files are mostly visible, but there is some CSS missing, it is not 100% like editor, notably math is broken. There is also a hosted way of exposing: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Sharing.
trilium.rocks however has a very good export, it is just a question of how much they had to hacked things, source at: github.com/zerebos/trilium.rocks
The default tHTML export uses frame navigation, with a toc fixed on the left frame. Efficient, but not of this century.
There is no concept of user created unique text IDs: you can have the same headers in the same folders in the UI. It's not even a matter of scopes. On exports they are differentiated as
1_name, 2_name, etc../Trilium Demo/Books/To read/1_HR.md
./Trilium Demo/Books/To read/2_HR.md
./Trilium Demo/Books/To read/HR.mdMarkdown export warns:
this preserves most of the formatting
Architecture: runs on local SQLite database via better-sqlite3. Data apparently stored in SQLite database at
~/.local/share/trilium-data, no raw files.Markup is stored as HTML as seen from:
sqlite3 document.db 'SELECT * from note_contents'. HTML is their native storage format, quite interesting. But this means it is not source centric, so any source editing would have to go via import/export. It can be done apparently: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Markdown but involves shoving a ZIP around.WYSIWYG based on ckeditor.com/ which is a dependency. It is kind of cool that the view in which you view the output is exactly the same as the one you edit in, and there is no intermediate format, just the HTML.
Math is KaTeX based.
It also runs on the browser via a server: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Server-installation. And they have a paid service for it at: trilium.cc/. Quite impressive.
They have server to from desktop sync: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/synchronization. There is no conflict resolution, one of them wins randomly. But they have revision history, and anything lost will be in the revision history. They have so many features it is mind blowing.
Maintainer announced he would be slowing down development since January 2024: github.com/zadam/trilium/issues/4620?ref=selfh.st
Interesting "gradual" WYSIWYG. You get inline previews for for things like images, maths and links. And if you click to edit the thing, the preview mostly goes away and becomes the corresponding source code instead.
TODO any concept of internal links/wikilinks? Seriously?
Zim zim-wiki.org/
Local only.
WYSIWYG:
- bold
- images
- lists. But it is either hard or impossible to have a paragraph inside a list item.
Mathematics requires a plugin and a full LaTeX install: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Equation_Editor.html They have a bunch of plugins: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins.html
Can only link to toplevel of each source, not subheaders? And subpages get forced scope. github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki
Publishing to static HTML can be done with:The output does not contain any table of contents? There is a plugin however: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Table_Of_Contents.html
zim --export Notes -o out