HelixNotes is completely free, open source, with no bloat. Your notes should be yours.
So we made sure they are. https://helixnotes.com/
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No vibe coding. No AI. No slop. This is absolutely screaming LLM
The whole website looks like AI.
Also the commit history is only 3 month old and the first commit is 26000 lines. How ever this could be longer in development and commits could be squashed. At this point, I doubt it though.
They could be hosting the source code on github or something like that and changed to couldberg no?
nope, the git history would move with the repo
Depends how you do it. Add a new remote and push, sure. Copy the src into a newly init repo, not so much. Granted there is no reason to do the latter but you could.
Be careful with Helix Notes. It is great. But it destroyed all your markdown table. It will replace the table with HTML code when you edit a file.
This looks like the slightly less bloated Logseq/Obsidian I’ve been dying for!
Genuinely curious what bloat does Obsidian come with? But yeah my first thought too was FOSS Obsidian
Personally I have only a hundred notes or so and really only the basic plugins and it still takes up to 10 seconds to load and become usable on my phone.
It is definitely not fast loading up but it is very fast in most other use cases I have seen. At work I use it with getting more towards 1000 notes and it works fine there usually, though there is some windows+ electron weirdness
At this point I just need a markdown editor for my phone and syncthing to move everything back and forth.
I do this with “Markor”, great notes app for txt and md files. All files locally and synced via Syncthing. Been using this for years, love it.
I’m using Joplin, sync’d across Nextcloud to my android phone, Linux laptop and Linux desktop.
this do much the same or …better ?
I’m doing this about an intermediate step. My notes are all in a GIT repository. So I use GIT to create the synchronization between the different devices. On the smartphone with PuppyGit. Positive side effect: The note app itself does not require synchronization.
How do you commit changes and solve conflicts? Thank you!
I am the only one that edit the notes. So I know when I changed what and thus perform push/pull in the correct order. It is very rare that I edit the same note on several devices at the same time.
Was AI used in the process of making this app, and if so, how? I have personal issues with using ‘vibe-coded’ software. This looks very, very nice, so I figured I’d ask.
Thanks for asking. Yes, we use AI as a tool in our workflow. The difference between our workflow and ‘vibe coding’ is that we can catch and fix problems. We’re not just shipping whatever an AI produces and hoping it works.
That’s still rather vague tbh. There’s a pretty big spectrum of how involved an AI gets beyond just letting the AI do everything, and the line between ‘vibe coding’ and not is blurry and changes between individuals.
Are you treating the AI like a glorified StackOverflow/Google to get suggestion and then manually writing/adapting the code yourself? Are you letting the AI do all the coding and running a lot of tests? Is it something in between or outside those examples?
I’m not trying to string you up, it’s just that communication and disclosure are important in FOSS
Fair point. To be more specific we’re somewhere in between. AI writes a lot of code for us, but there’s a developer in the loop who reads every line and understands what it’s doing. We still make the call on whether it stays unlike the traditional vibe coder who doesn’t know what to look for. Hope that clears things up a bit.
I see, thank you for explaining. Personally, I will stick with alternatives as I’ve a moral obligation to LLM usage for things like this, although it sucks to say that as the ‘selling features’ of this app are really enticing to me. Hope things work out.
I’ll wait a few months and then check in again.
It stores all metadata in YAML frontmatter and doesn’t cache in an SQLite blob? I bet that decision will be reversed pretty quickly once people try to migrate a 10k+ note collection and want to do operations like search immediately instead of scanning every file to build an in-memory cache.
You’re right that all metadata lives in markdown frontmatter, but it’s not uncached. The notes list also only reads around 2KB frontmatter, so it stays fast well past 10k notes. We do have some tweaks planned though to optimize this even further. This is a great suggestion, thank you!
Is there an option to make check boxes for shopping lists? I cant find one.
Edit - yes there is. I found it.
Light mode - what’s wrong with you? /s (but not really).
