Dendron

As a part-time/hobby developer, and person taking many notes for both my work and personal life, Dendron ticks all the right boxes for me: - It is based on Visual Studio Code, a powerful and extremely customizable platform for editing all kinds of text-based files, with a huge ecosystem of plugins that play nicely together with Dendron and enhance the workflow. - It uses Markdown, which has all the (for me) necessary formatting options, without forcing me to use a bloated, slow and proprietary WYSIWYG editor - and I can easily process the files with third-party tools or migrate my notes to another tool, if Dendron no longer meets my needs. Basically, I own my notes, not some company. This is also an incredible plus for privacy-minded people. - It uses git (or other source code management system) for version history, which is a really clever choice (why reinvent the wheel, if these tools do it so much better). - It has a friendly and professional community, including developers that listen to feedback and continously improve the product. - It allows me to build a "second brain" by linking back and forth between notes, while at the same time allowing me to use as little or as much structure in my hierarchy as I want. Who wouldn't I recommend Dendron to at this moment? - Non-techy people that want a one-click installer and a UI instead of keyboard shortcuts. (Learn to use keyboard shortcuts, seriously, you can thank me later.) - If you really don't want to use git, or another type of source control, which provides the version history for your notes. - If you work mostly on mobile devices (iOS/Android). There are solutions/workaround, but to me they feel sub-par to alternative note-taking tools at the moment.

Dendron has become my goto tool for journalling, structuring thoughts and ideas, planning, recording meetings, running with todo's. The list goes on and increases as the team even come out with new templates to existing entries to entirely new templates that make me think of what I'm not using it for now and then use those new features too. Without the newer features, I would still use Dendron as a place to store thougths in a way that you think rather than a way that you structure databases. This reduces friction and permits you to get the ideas down right away and therefore not to lose them. The only complaint I might have is that I dont yet use it enough. I could be losing 10% of new thoughts and ideas if I dont get to make an entry. I'm working on an app that could be used to update a Dendron Vault but I've no doubt there may be one out there already and if not soon they may be several. Dendron appears to be growing and improving all the time. Any time spent using Dendron is time invested.

I've gone through dozens of note taking systems and approaches over the past few years, each time transferring my existing notes across and making small iterative improvements. Dendron feels like it might be the final step on this trip, since it is open source, very easy to extend, and based on plaintext markdown files.