Show HN: memEx, a personal knowledge base inspired by zettlekasten and org-mode

A folder of markdown docs in your favourite text editor, ftw!

+ It’s all within the editor you already know really well. Uses your existing tools.

+ Many editors have really good support for markdown built in. Treat H1’s like notes and along with modern fuzzy search for files/symbols you can easily get to any note and jump around.

+ If you want smarter [[liking]] there’s some good plugins out there to bring this to your editor.

+ Simple, future proof and no lock-in.

I’m currently enjoying markdown-oxide, an LSP for markdown docs. Captures all your notes as symbols so you can fuzzy search and “find references”, etc. supports #tags, too.

I have fallen in love with SVG+text Mermaid diagrams embedded in markdown code blocks, and LLMs are really great at generating them (by reading design documents and source code) and editing them with natural language commands. And they're not inaccessible unsearchable dead-end images you have to laboriously regenerate and check into the repo whenever you want to change something! ;)

Mermaid: Diagramming and charting tool: JavaScript based diagramming and charting tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically.

https://mermaid.js.org/

Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid: A picture tells a thousand words. Now you can quickly create and edit diagrams in markdown using words with Mermaid support in your Markdown files.

https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

Creating diagrams: Create diagrams to convey information through charts and graphs:

https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...

The Official Guide to Mermaid.js:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/The-Official-Guide-to-Mer...

I currently use flatnotes[1] as a Frontend with a background cronjob to add, commit and push every night.

Works pretty well so far with some acceptable nitpicks. It was a quick and dirty solution to overcome logseq couldn't run in a Server that time... Never needed anything else until now :-)

1: https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes

Mermaid looks amazing. Did not know gh had support just via

  ```mermaid

  ```

Thanks for mentioning this.

This! I have all my notes in markdown files in folders. I self host Silverbullet on top which is a nice web UI for managing notes, tagging them etc. All tags are stored in the individual markdown files using frontmatter. I also push my notes to forgejo (gitea) which means I have versioning. Works well for me!

There's definitely a lot to recommend w/ your approach, which actually overlaps a bit w/ my reasons for using Obsidian.

My obd vault is "a folder of markdown docs" (which retains the "future-proof, no lock-in" benefits you cited). But the excellent WYSIWYG UX (open files in Edit mode, w/ "Live Preview" enabled) is something I haven't seen replicated in any VSCode or Cursor extension/plugin. I also prefer a dedicated tool for note-taking and "PKM" (Personal Knowledge Management"), as a peer of my IDE(s) for coding. I get to use the best tool for the job, w/ no compromises. Switching to a different IDE for a given project (eg IntelliJ for wrangling Kotlin) doesn't disrupt my workflow, and having clear context boundaries (note-taking vs coding) is a personal preference.

YMMV, different strokes,.... I know some emacs org-mode fans out there will extoll the benefits of using "one tool to rule them all", which does sound compelling... (shrug).

I love that there are such a variety of quality tools and approaches -- and, I'm very happy with mine.

Silverbullet looks pretty cool; its landing page describes a feature set and workflows virtually identical to my use of Obsidian. Thanks for sharing!

I used a similar setup for a while: Obsidian for taking notes in markdown, and vscode for coding.

Eventually I moved to using vscode for both. My gigantic notes.md file is always open in tab 1, so I can go to it immediately with Ctrl + 1.

Finding notes in a single file is easier for me than finding them in a bazillion tiny files. And there's less friction whenever I need to make a note (no need to create and name a new file).

I went the opposite way, I started off as you (with nvim), then moved to other open-source PKMs like Trilium, then used Obsidian and it was love at first sight.

Keeping everything in a git repo makes it easy to sync across devices + backed up.

Absolutely get this. And yes there's no doubt that a dedicated tool can bring features and a UX that's hard to replicate with a general purpose text editor with the same degree of polish, if at all in some cases. Some of the stuff in Obsidian does look compelling (shrug)!

I think what matters more is like you say - how the data is stored. It's been nice to see this convergence towards markdown and it's this that's seems the real sweet spot (or plain text, more generally). Separate the data from the logic and you're free to operate on your notes with whatever fits at the time, or even with different tools at the same time (on mobile, say).

Not news to many folk here on HN but a refreshing contrast to other PKM that use proprietary formats, often along with monthly subscription fees for what is essentially variations on "editing a plain-text database".