cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43147928
I built a note-taking app because the one I wanted didn’t exist. Clean UI, local .md files, no cloud, no account.
Built with Rust + Tauri 2.0 + SvelteKit. Full-text search powered by Tantivy. Graph view, AI writing tools (bring your own key), Obsidian import, version history.
Available for Linux (AppImage, APT, AUR), Windows, and macOS. Source: https://codeberg.org/ArkHost/HelixNotes
vs Obsidian: Same local-first philosophy with plain .md files, but HelixNotes gives you a clean WYSIWYG editor out of the box. No plugin setup, no CSS tweaking, no learning curve. Open an app, write, close it. vs Joplin: Joplin uses its own database format internally. HelixNotes stores everything as plain markdown files in folders on your filesystem. Also Tauri instead of Electron, so much lower resource usage. Both are great projects. I built HelixNotes because I wanted UpNote’s UI with Obsidian’s philosophy, and that combination didn’t exist.
I wrote a longer comparison here: https://helixnotes.com/why-i-built-helixnotes.html
Did you muck with Logseq at all? That’s my preferred note taking app and it checks a lot of your boxes, the biggest miss probably being the Electron app part. That said, I’ve never noticed any slow downs.
But this is great to have options and a larger ecosystem. I’ll have to check it out.
Logseq Database version is close to beta release. I’m looking forward to that since Logseq can get slow for power users (queries) with large graphs.
I looked at Logseq, it’s a great project. Main difference is HelixNotes focuses on a clean WYSIWYG experience out of the box rather than an outliner approach. Different workflows.