Dendron is neat alternative to note taking

#note taking #vscode

I generally use Notion to keep my notes and journal but for office work, it’s not a good idea to publish these notes to a third party application.

My second preferred way is open Visual Studio Code on a directory and start writing there. Group by projects, track the work with various extensions. But I needed a better tool to link the notes, tag them, categorize them - meeting notes, journal, ideas, etc.

Search Results

One fine day I just searched ’take notes vscode’ and this tool called Dendron turned up as the first result. Curious to explore it, I went through the wiki and they had me. One can easily find the value in the tool just by going through the wiki. You don’t even have to try it.

Breifly About Dendron

Few important features:

  • No hierarchies
  • Notes have schema namespaces and strucutre defined in schema.yml (as a programmer, I felt at home)
  • Apart from a normal note, few special kind of notes - daily, scratch, journal, meeting and it nicely creates it with today’s date
  • Graph view, tags, backlinks
  • Refactor the names
  • Move around and links get corrected automatically

So it provides a structured way for me to write notes, track my projects and helps me keep all my findings in one place.

Best part - it comes as an extension. So no additional software requred. I can install it, if I don’t need it, my notes are still plain old markdown notes which I can use with any tool. It has a small learning curve. Not as Emacs, but half a day is enough to get a hang of it and tune it to your needs.

If you were intrigued, I would definitely recommend you to go and check their site.