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Nibodhika ,

This looks awesome and exactly what I have been looking for.

One question about implementation just out of curiosity, is there any database? I’m worried that when it gets to hundreds or thousands of pages querying things becomes slow if it’s just scanning files.

zef OP ,

Yes, it’s using SQLite under the hood in Online mode and IndexedDB in the browser in Sync mode.

Nibodhika ,

SQLite should be more than enough, I can’t find the file on the space folder though, is it created inside the docker container on server startup? Is there a reason not to store it in space so it doesn’t need to be regenerated each time?

zef OP ,

It’s .silverbullet.db in the root of your space folder. Note that because there’s no schemas in SB, SQLite is used as a fancy key-value store and many queries become somewhat (but not very) optimized table scans. In this SQLite file you’ll see a “kv” table that contains everything.

Nibodhika ,

I feel like facepalming myself to death for having asked such a stupid question before running an ls -a on the folder.

One last question, I’ve been reading on Plugs because there’s one thing that I use regularly that I think doesn’t exist and want to know if it would be possible for me to implement, it’s called plantuml. Essentially it’s a plug that would act on a specific block of code, like the latex one, and would use POST the code to a configurable url, get an image as return and display that instead.

zef OP ,

Yes this is doable, with the caveat that I have not invested a lot of time in documenting all the plug APIs etc. You can have a look at the mermaid plug to get a sense of how this can be done, it will be similar except that you — indeed — may end up having to post something to a URL somewhere rather than render the thing on-the-fly with a JavaScript library you load externally: github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet-mermaid

Nibodhika ,

Actually mermaid seems to be able to do all I’m doing with plantuml and syntax is very similar, might give that a try before since that one would also work in offline mode.

zef OP ,

That said, I have not tested this with hundreds of thousands of notes (I have close to a thousand myself). No performance issues there, but…

Nibodhika ,

I said hundreds or thousands, I don’t expect to be creating hundreds of thousands of pages, but from your reply on the other thread SQLite should be more than capable of handling this scale.

Nice knowing that you have close to a thousand and it’s still fine. It will take me a long time to get to that amount of pages, but if I can get started with this it seems like an awesome way of storing knowledge bases, so I expect it will grow quite rapidly as I migrate all of my different things into it.

d13 ,

This is very cool, and I’ve been watching the project for a month or so.

I like the query setup and the templates look very interesting. One of my biggest complaints about Logseq is how much of a pain simple query operations can be.

A few things make me hesitate a bit:

  • I’ve been burned on single-dev passion projects in the past.
  • As a self hosted web app, it’s a bit more difficult to manage on a company owned machine. I know Electron apps get hate, but that would ease some pain here.
  • The rapid pace of development is both exciting and worrisome. For example, a recent update completely changed the underlying templating engine from a well-known open source solution to a custom solution. I worry if I rely on this, something might catch me by surprise.

What are your thoughts on those concerns, OP?

zef OP ,

All your concerns are completely fair.

Regarding the first, the best I can offer is what many other project in this space say: “it’s just markdown files on disk, you can take them anywhere at any time”. Obviously this is only partially true, because the more SB-specific features you use, the more you get locked in. Your notes will never go away (if you back them up). But all time building queries and templates, would have been wasted.

Regarding company owned machines: a concern I heard for Logseq and Obsidian is that people cannot use them at work/with a work machine because they’re not allowed to install anything. For SilverBullet I’d recommend not installing it on your laptop (work or otherwise), but rather on some other machine. Perhaps you have a Raspberry Pi lying around unused. Or maybe you buy a cheap VPS (silverbullet.md itself runs on a $5/month Hetzner VM). Then you can access it from anywhere with a web browser, and I assume your work laptop has one of those.

Regarding the high pace of development: also fair. The reason I have not been very actively promoting SB so far is because of the high change churn rate. If you’re a power user, you kind of need to keep on top of stuff. Mostly I attempt to give people migration tools, but this is always a opportunity cost decision. Until recently some fundamentals still didn’t feel quite right (like the templates). I think we’re getting there now though. Another one I still need to figure out is how to do the distribution of templates, slash commands. This idea of a Library you import works, but you cannot easily keep it up to date. This so something to still figure out. Generally I’ll do my best to mark the parts of this that are experimental or prone to still change.

I hope that helps.

d13 ,

Thanks for your answers! Very fair thoughts, particularly about the flexibility of keeping things as just files on disk.

Regarding the work thing, I should clarify my use case: I’d like to take work related notes that could contain privileged company data. With a standalone app, I can install it and manage the files on my device (with cloud syncing in an approved corporate way). I could still probably do that here, but it requires the work of running the web server locally. Unfortunately, an external source like a VPS wouldn’t be allowed.

I have one more question, if you have some time: One of the things I like most about Logseq is that when there is a list of back links on a page, the context capture is excellent (likely due to it being an outliner). I’ve noticed that with SilverBullet, the context capture might begin/end in the middle of a word, etc. Is there a way to configure that or plans to enhance it?

zef OP ,

Makes sense. Regarding the linked mention snippets. Please create a GitHub issue (github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet) for that. Right now it does the simplest thing, which is just to take x characters on each side. That can definitely be improved.

sailingbythelee ,

I clicked on the link to “installation instructions” on your home page in a couple of different places and got the error “e.split is not a function”.

paletochen ,

It works for me on the main page. The Installation link sends you to:silverbullet.md/Install

sailingbythelee ,

Thanks, your link worked for me.

jqubed ,
@jqubed@lemmy.world avatar

This looks interesting; is anyone here using it?

zef OP ,

Well I have for the last two years, but I’m biased because I wrote it 🤓

farcaller ,

I’d be curious to see comparison with Logseq. As it’s rightly mentioned, there are thousands of note taking apps and I’m not quite sure I see the selling point of SB. I really love the idea of notes as a database, but the query langauage seems subpar, more akin to obsidian’s dataview than the overwhelming power of tiddlywiki’s filters or Logseq’s queries.

I went from evernote to tiddlywiki to Obsidian to Logseq and somewhat stuck here now because I got the powerful queries in a very neat UI. With the market oversaturated as it is, I’d be nice to see what Silverbullet brings to the game that others don’t, what are the distinguishing features.

zef OP ,

While I cannot give you an in depth comparison, I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap in functionality. Where I think things are heading in a relatively novel direction is with the recent improvements I’ve been making to templates. While long, this video gives a reasonable sense of what that can do and I’d say it’s early days: youtu.be/ZiM1RM0DCgo?si=qL795lyKNe9HwoxI

zef OP ,

Also see here: lemmy.world/comment/7440117

clmbmb ,

Yes, I do and it’s great. I just wrote a template for cooking recipes.

conrad82 ,

Yes, I have used it for many months. It has been the best solution for my use case for a while. Which is tasks, shopping, planning (trips, …), recipes, and a simple knowledgebase. It was the offline support that set it apart from some other solutions

I have the files in a syncthing folder, so I can access the files without running silverbullet

My biggest problem is keeping up with all the changes. Zef made some youtube videos that are helpful

prcrst ,
@prcrst@lemmy.world avatar

I use it and love it. Having the metadata (tags, dates, …) of your pages available to query and organize is awesome. I also love the tagged tasks feature.

Discover5164 , (edited )

i’m using it at work to take notes and write documentation.

i think it’s a fantastic app.

i have it as a pwa and have at least one silverbullet for each desktop.

i have ~100 notes perfectly organized in silverbullet!

the only things i would change is compatability with other tools. there is no way to export to PDF, if you nees to convert the note to docx you need to copy paste everything.

klassasin ,

I’m using it! I’ve been using it to track various household things and it’s worked great so far!

fathog ,

Wow, this is super cool - saving this for when I finally spruce up my old desktop for a home server. You’re a talented person mate

Qu4ndo ,
@Qu4ndo@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Nice notetaking app with powerful features!

Main question for me: Can you export plain markdown from the application (or Docker Volume) or is everything only accessible through the application?

I don’t want to manually export my stuff if I want to switch note application sometime in the future

zef OP ,

All files are kept on disk as “plain” markdown files. I say “plain” with quotes because SilverBullet does support some non-standard markdown notations. But in essence, like logseq and obsidian: it’s a folder with text files under the hood.

Qu4ndo ,
@Qu4ndo@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Nice! Thanks for the clarification.

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