UX Review (Just tried yesterday)

[mofosyne]

Just found out that #3890 development has stopped.
Well anyway I'm noting down my observations at least for people who want to develop this further on the various pain points I've noticed a bit.

• I would have preferred if there is compatibility with obsidian based vaults. Right now it looks like you cannot directly open a folder without having to 'initialise' it as a dendron workspace.

  • Also importing the obsidian vault would lose the folder hierarchy as well...
  • Ideally you should be able to just directly open the folder up... so maybe best to move the dendron configs to .dendron folder like how obsidian does .obsidian

• The graph view is hard to navigate compared to obsidian... I don't mind the exclusion of notes without links, but it seems like the obsidian import process missed lots of links I created in my repository.

• I really liked that you have a calendar view and it would be great to pursue that feature further especially in terms of creating daily notes (My preference is that these notes are in folder /YEAR/MONTH/date.md) (The plugin I use in obsidian is https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin )

• This plugin https://github.com/esm7/obsidian-map-view where I was able to get a geographical context for my notes is something I missed with this system

Overall there is lots of potential for dendron (or a fork of it) to be a great alternative to obsidian as I always found that editing text in vscode to be much nicer and file searching by filename to be more intuitive. Since vscode is my main code editor, it also means I can reuse my text editing muscle memory as well.

Perhaps you could also investigate if it's possible to allow for cross compatibility of obsidian plugins with the dendron system... even if it requires a small amount of extension editor developer porting... if you can reduce the barrier of a port. Then that means you gain access to a lot more of the obsidian plugin ecosystem.

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Plugins that I used the most that you may want to consider natively implementing an equivalent:

• https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin : Calendar View (You almost have it, just need an opinionated folder structure)
• https://github.com/esm7/obsidian-map-view : Map View for geographical context of notes
• https://github.com/vbeskrovnov/obsidian-contacts : A consistent way to record contact notes

What you could do to distinguish yourself from obsidian is to provide a more opinionated folder structure (especially for fresh vaults/pods), so people don't have to bikeshead over folder structure. This is an easy win for stuff like contact, daily notes, place notes etc...

Also if you want an extra feature to consider as a semi-killer app. Autotagging of notes would be appreciated... you could have a predefined list of keywords phrases that is unlikely to be just normal conversational words like "programming tutorial" in "I did a programming tutorial today". Or you could add support for https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile and use it specifically for generating tags.