Back to Logseq for now

General
1

I am a long time Logseq user who finds it not quite right, but I know it well enough that I can get work done.

Unfortunately, as much as I can see the power and possibilities of Silver Bullet, I just can’t invest the time in it learning all the ins and outs and dealing with what I am seeing as a number of bugs and/or deficiencies.

I truly love the end-user programming model. It is brilliant and I’ve done enough with it so far to see the power. I am a highly technical user with a very minor amount of coding experience, but decades of experience in tech in general, so I think I would be a pretty ideal user. It seems like though, much of the documentation around the more powerful features of the platform is oriented to more experienced developer skills and makes a lot of assumptions about knowledge that many users may not have. So, that leaves me hunting around the forums for example code and then spending way too much time trying to figure out how to customize it to make it work.

Then again, maybe I am not the target for the platform. Maybe it is really meant for more experienced devs.

I also think that upgrades and chages to the core functioning and syntax of the system may be also what I am running into. I ran into a few different things that made it feel like there was a little hangover there.

All that said, this is a beautiful piece of software. The concept is brilliant. I wish it was built to be used in other projects, because we have a project for which the engine would be an elegant solution to a number of issues.

Anyway, I am rambling. Here’s the bottom line. I love what you are building @zef . It is a really brilliant and powerful concept and if I had more free time to learn it, I would dive in deeper, but I’ve already spent way too much time on it. It could be for me a far superior product to Logseq, it just feels like it isn’t ready for me.

I will check back, Thank you for creating this and please keep plugging away at it., it is brilliant.

5 Likes
2

I too moved here from Logseq. Logseq was actually perfect for me until they decided to move from a markdown file based system to a database based system. Despite assurances that it would be convertible back to markdown, I know that won’t last long. So, I implemented the switch. The difference is that I am retired and have the time to experiment and learn.

In my case, I redesigned my note taking system to take advantage of what Silverbullet already has available. I’ll eventually get around to learning Lua and how to write scripts for Silverbullet but It isn’t a top priority for me.

Anyway, welcome to the Silverbullet community. I hope you will find the time to learn and adopt Silverbullet as a Logseq replacement. :smile:

3 Likes
3

Hey Brad,

Thanks for this message. I can completely see your point. I’d be interested to know which specific bugs and deficiencies you hit to see if I agree that they are deficiencies and maybe prioritize fixing them.

That said, we all have different needs and priorities. One trap of powerful tools is that the power can become an objective in its own. Especially in the PKMS and productivity space tons of people end up spending insane amount of time building the perfect system and barely any actually using it. SilverBullet gives you so much flexibility that it may just become unproductive at times, to be honest. Rather than using the tool, you end up working on the tool itself most of the time. I’m definitely a victim of this trap myself — I mean, I built SilverBullet and definitely spent an inappropriate amount of time working on SB itself compared to how much time I spend using it (also a lot, of course).

Enjoy LogSeq! I hear good things.

@dmick1954 I think misread @clickbrain 's message, he actually is moving back TO LogSeq :wink:

5 Likes
4

This is a much more general problem than software. Same applies to the boat I built!

2 Likes
5

Thank you for taking the time to reply Zef.

The below are some of the things I ran into off the top of my head. Don’t get me wrong, I still know that I would rather be using SB, but for me it is just a matter of the time required to use it effectively that is causing me to reluctantly go back to LogSeq.

I really hate that they are moving to a database model and may just fork what is there now, so I can continue to use it with markdown, but one feature coming which is collaborative documents is also something I would like to have from a system like this.

Anyway, right now it is just about having the time to invest. I realize that SB is just you plugging away at it and you aren’t getting paid for it and there is no way you could implement feature parity with LogSeq or even that you want to do that, because it defeats the purpose of end-user programming, but I do think that there are steps you can take to introduce non developers to it’s power without them having to spend a ton of time learning or digging to figure out how things work.

Your docs are really friendly in tone and at times do a fantastic job of explaining things, but at other times as I outline below, they are lacking.

I do have one suggestion for making it easier - fine tune an LLM or use RAG access to a small LLM that we can install with SB on our machines using Ollama or similar and have it create what we want SB to do by accessing a knowledge base in the data that ships with SB.

I ran into some things not working the way the docs said they would work. For example, I spent a good amount of time customizing the Daily Note template for my needs and then I changed my index page to it. It then kept going back to the single bullet original template. It is actually loading on Home, but not the template I created. I just went back and opened the Daily Note template and for a brief moment, my changes were there and then disappeared and it was back to the original 1 bullet template.

In the settings page, it is telling me that "index page must match “page-ref”, but I have indexPage: “Journal/Day/{{today}}” in that field based on the instructions in the docs.

Your video had a keyboard combo I believe of CMD-Shift-T for opening templates, but I had to hunt around elsewhere to discover it is CMD-Shit-K.

I had a difficult time getting the SETTINGS page to load and then figuring out I had to paste in the SETTINGS page in the manual in order to get the things I want in the settings.

The queries while simple enough from a language standpoint, aren’t clearly documented with enough examples so someone not experienced with it can actually understand how they work.

You mention in the docs, that tasks can have a duedate, but nowhere I could find how to actually add a duedate, so I had to search in the forums until I found it.

Trying to find the templates that ship with SB was a great mystery to me. the docs don’t always give paths to them and it seemed like the locations of some that were referenced in videos or elsewhere had actually change.

Formatting snippet layouts is a big mystery to me, I guess because I don’t know the language and how they impact the layouts. I am confident that if I had enough examples, I could get better at them and get along, but it should also ship with a variety. I finally found an example after I found where the templates where for a task list and started screwing around with that all important list, but because I don’t know the query language well enough, there was no way I could figure out how to just list tasks from a particular page or with a particular tag.

I don’t understand why the incredibly useful default table layouts that are easy to call, don’t have links to pages/references in them by default and why tasks in a table don’t have a checkbox to change state.

Many of the things I struggled with above are easily solved with the query builder in LogSeq or with default formatting and templates that are easy to find and install.

I had the PWA in my phone, but the lack of a back and forward button was highly frustrating. They should be on by default in mobile at the least, but even on desktop. It wasn’t until I found the Settings page example that I finally discovered I could actually enable the buttons.

There were other things that I ran into, but I of course foolishly didn’t take notes as I spent time searching forums and manual and your videos to solve my issues. There really is nothing inherently wrong with SB. I know what it is capable of doing, but I just can’t invest the time to do it right now.

Thank you again for creating this really cool tool. It is what I want, just not what I can do right now.

All the best,

Brad

1 Like
6

@zef,

I am aware that @clickbrain is moving back to Logseq. However, I sensed the he is doing so only because he doesn’t have the time currently to learn his way around Silverbullet. I’m sure that he’ll be back. So, I felt that the welcome was warranted.

I may be guilty of imposing my experience on him as well. I too initially felt that Silverbullet would require more work than I had the energy or time to spend. I too went back and forth for a time. Then I realized that if you could use it, then perhaps I could find a way to use it as is for my purposes. As it turns out, I have been able to do just that. I’ve had to do quite a bit of trial and error but it has gradually worked out. I’m using Silverbullet full-time now. I still have Logseq installed only because I haven’t yet transferred everything to Silverbullet.

I hope this clears things up a little at least. Thanks for the comment. It is much appreciated. :grinning:

UPDATE: I wrote this reply before I read @clickbrain’s response. :blush:

2 Likes
7

Spot on man. Thanks.

1 Like
8

I understand your feedback and I share most of it. But I try to not to expect too much when this is one person’s spare time project.
A lot of your your feedback relates to a lack of documentation and can be solved by you and the community with a contribution.
@zef created Silverbullet for people with a hacker mindset and as a hacker, you can contribute to creating your ideal PKM.

1 Like
9

Yeah, I made it very clear in both my posts I understand that and made it very clear that I didn’t expect him to do more and that the system may not be for me as someone that is too busy to spend the time. He asked me to be specific about the things I encountered, so that is why I wrote that reply.

3 Likes
10

This is something I don’t like either about silverbullets documentation: It’s a mix of reference and guide, some things are written as a guide and some are written as a reference. I feel like these should ideally be separated into a minimal and small reference about all features and extensive guides, especially on common workflows. This would be a lot of work tho…

11

I am a new user to silverbullet too and I have been using logseq for a while. I think the biggest problem with silverbullet right now(in the context of being logseq replacement) is the search function is just too poor compared to logseq, which just works with “minimal user inputs”. I can just dump every thing in random places and i will find them later by just one short cut ctrl+k. silverbullet simply does not have a good story even with the search plugin.

sb does have advantages though, logseq is not very suitable collaboration. sb works much better in that regard

1 Like
12

I guess the answer to the search issue is up to you. I’ve chosen to be more careful regarding the naming convention I am using. I’m also implementing a menu system so that I can do quick searches for pages.

This may be more work than you are willing to do at this time. I am aware that this is recommended to users of Obsidian. I’ve also found that putting pages in directories/folders to be helpful i.e sb/menu my/menu c/menu nvim/menu. This can be done simply by changing the name of a page. Searches become easier too. This may help or you may choose to stay with Logseq. I would have continued using Logseq except that they have chosen to move to a database model rather than a markdown model. I prefer to maintain control of my data. So, I moved. I decided to adapt to Silverbullet and build my infrastructure to make SB workable for me. Good Luck and I hope this helps.