Introductions

General
1

Please tell us: who are you? How did you find about SilverBullet, how long have you been using it and what do you like (or hate) about it?

2

Hello there. My name is Zef (obviously) and I first found out about SilverBullet by creating it. It had a different name back then (donā€™t even remember exactly), but you know ā€” it was going to be the silver bullet to all my note taking and writing problems, so the name only seemed appropriate.

I was born in The Netherlands, but moved to Poland about 12 years ago. Iā€™m married, have three kids (all sons). I work as Head of Engineering at Jimdo, so Iā€™m a senior engineering manager. Obviously, I use SilverBullet a lot in my day to day. Lots of meetings, action items, writing ā€” all in SB.

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3

Hi, I am Valentin :wave:
I am a computer science student from Germany. Somehow, I got stuck on Silverbullet when I was looking for a good personal knowledge management tool to structure my notes. Along the way, I tried many other tools. Most important to me was Markdown support, offline functionality and easy sync between multiple devices. In the beginning, I also thought a graphical visualization like the one implemented in graphview was very cool. In the meantime, I prefer a good search instead of such a visualization. In my opinion, the search is also the only feature with potential for improvement in Silverbullet. Apart from that, Silverbullet simply fulfills all the requirements I have for a PKM tool. In particular, Zefā€™s idea of implementing the whole thing as a PWA is simply brilliant. This way, all my notes are available on all devices with a browser (offline) and thatā€™s fantastic. At the moment Iā€™m writing my masterā€™s thesis and for this Iā€™m also using Silverbullet quite intensively to manage the notes on my literature. It integrates really well with Zotero because you can use Ctrl+Shift+V to make direct deep links to certain markers in the documents. Iā€™m curious to see how Silverbullet will continue to develop. :sunflower:

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4

Hi, Iā€™m Max,

Currently finishing my Bachelor in Design / Computer Science in Germany. I discovered Silverbullet on my Journey through different note-taking apps, deciding that none fit all my needs, trying to write my own, abandoning that, going back to Obsidian and then finally discovering Silverbullet. This was about a year ago.

One of my main requirements was that all the data remained as open, future-proof, and as close to Markdown as possible. This makes it easier to treat my markdown files as a sort of database, so I can write a server that exposes my files over a simple rest API. I could for example expose all my Recipes/*.md files like this:

https://res.max-richter.dev/recipes

What I really like about Silverbullet:

  • open-source
  • offline capable pwa
  • vim mode

What I donā€™t love:

  • seems kinda complicated to write plugins, could also be a skill issue :slight_smile:

Thanks Zef and all the contributors for this amazing software :))

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5

Hi,
Iā€™m a Spanish living in Switzerland, working as an Engineering Manager in an IT company.
Silverbullet has been my daily tool since I found it, deprecating all the other ones that i tested/used for the past 20 years.
I was already using markdown for my notes, using foam before I found SB.
The initial reason for switching was to move away from the need to use vscode with foam.

But that was just the beginning. With time, once i started learning more about SB and Zef made it more powerful over time, there was no need to look anywhere else.

SB gives me the control, independence (from tools), power and workflows that I need to manage my professional and personal live.

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6

Hi, Iā€™m Marek, I was born and stayed until recently in Poland. At the moment Iā€™m doing a PhD about flight simulation in Italy.

I started taking a lot of notes with Dendron in 2021, but as I used it more I started to need something a bit different. So, at the start of this year, I kept trying alternatives until I found this reddit post from a search engine. Itā€™s been about two weeks now, but itā€™s already doing its job great ā€” write down anything I want to remember, so I have more space left in my head :smile:

Why I switched: markdown editor that shows images where you write the text, easily accessible from a computer in the lab, auto-sync. And that itā€™s a separate window, neither text editor or browser. Other things that were prerequisites, but less unique to silverbullet: open source, markdown-based, hints when you start typing the link, self-hosted, vim mode, extensible.

Currently what annoys me most, but is not really silverbulletā€™s fault, is that if I run it in a separate window as PWA, the links open in Chrome, which isnā€™t my primary browser.

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7

Hello, I am Nikolas.

I am studying tango as a musician in Buenos Aires. I play the chromatic harmonica and sing.

I am from Athens, Greece. My first degree was on mathematics and recently did a masterā€™s in philosophy.

I first read about SilverBullet on Hacker News about 7-8 months ago. I was using Logseq till then, but got interested enough to try it.

It was my first attempt in selfhosting, and now I also have Miniflux and SearXNG going as well.

I use SilverBullet for:

  • organizing reading material (pdfs, weblinks)
  • task list
  • event list
  • shopping list
  • text editing

I organized my masterā€™s thesisā€™ material on SB and found myself using it instead of Zettlr to write most of it.

So far I have taken a Logseq-like approach.

  • I have a ā€œjournalā€ page where I take daily notes of anything/everything
  • I use queries to display task, event and shopping lists on a ā€œlandingā€ page
  • I use queries on pages with a specific topic to display lists with all entries from my journal that are related to this topic.

What I really like about SilverBullet is:

  • how it ā€œlive previewsā€ markdown
  • it is selfhosted
  • PWA, available from any device
  • queries and templates
  • minimal and clean ui
  • very adaptable to what you want to do with it
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8

Hi everyone,

I am an Italian archaeologist working in academia with satellite images and R for data analysis, but in general Iā€™ve always been a tech enthusiast (altough self-learner in most of the things).
I first heard about silverbullet when searching alternatives for Obsidian. I grew tired on having to relied on thousands of plugins to achieve my needs and I wanted a solution that provided the necessary things out of the box. I wanted also something that worked locally, with physical files on my laptop, and open-source.

SB ticked all the boxes. Basically I am using it to organize the things and projects that I have to do at work. I used to this in Obsidian, but the process was clunky and reliant on external plugins and JS code. No other solution worked until SB. I am very happy to have replaced other tools with it.

Plus, markdown, pleasant and smooth writing experience, minimal and clean, and always improving. Thanks Zef and every contributor for this software :slight_smile:

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9

Iā€™m Chris,

Iā€™m a computer scientist. I am a researcher with a lot of systems and low-level and back-end development experience. I normally am more comfortable in Python, Zig, Rust, and Haskell - Iā€™ve always avoided web-apps. I randomly found of about SilverBullet on a mastodon thread and started digging. Iā€™ve only been using it for a few weeks, but really like it so far and have switched my work and personal setups to use it. Iā€™ve been fascinated with PKM for 3-4 years and have been using Obsidian over the years. Iā€™ve also tried standard notes, Logseq and Joplin, but struggled synchronizing all of them between my linux, macOS, and iOS setups navigating the challenges for synchronizing all of them. I donā€™t like that even the other ā€œopen sourceā€ PKM tools are looking to make money off of synchronization so they intentionally donā€™t prioritize making self-hosted options usable and a priority. The main features in my mind are:

  • fully open source
  • programmability / query language
  • easy to self-host
  • PWA support on multiple platforms
  • ā€œofflineā€ functionality
  • prioritzing keeping data in markdown and syncā€™d with git

I also like the feel of a closer-knit community where my input and use-cases are likely well aligned.

Iā€™ve been tracking possible future feature requests and things Iā€™d like to implement. Currently the biggest hurdle is in using it on mobile, as I tend to do a fair amount of use from my iphone, so the fact that keyboard shortcuts arenā€™t a thing, and managing list indentation and placement is pretty hard from mobile currently is a big challenge, but Iā€™m pretty patient with that. The core and design of the system itself is quite nice and feels like it is a community worth investing my time in.

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11

Bumping this thread for visibility, since we have been having a fair number of new joiners lately.

12

Iā€™m Dan, a Systems Engineer/Technical Consultant based in Australia. I came across SilverBullet in a YouTube video while looking for alternatives to Obsidian.

Iā€™ve been using SB for a little over 2wks now and enjoying it. Iā€™m hoping it can completely take over from Obsidian. Iā€™m currently in the process of moving my personal notes across which consists of:

  • Daily Journal
  • Home lab notes
  • Code snippets
  • Research notes
  • Tasks

Hope to be able to bring all my work notes across:

  • How to/deployment guides
  • Meeting notes
  • Project notes
  • Daily work log
  • Code snippets
  • Tasks

What I love:

  • Not overwhelming to get started
  • Self hostable
  • PWA (also a negative)
  • Live preview markdown
  • Space-Scripts
  • Templates
  • Simple and clean UI

What I dislike/struggle with:

  • PWA ā€œofflineā€ mode - specifically conflict management
  • No attachment management
  • No block level linking or linking to headers - this might be Obsidian/Logseq behaviour, but it is a nice feature to easily link to a block header of a note instead of having to add an anchor.
  • Advanced queries - I find the syntax a bit annoying to write, but again this is more being used to Dataview in Obsidian.
  • Folders arenā€™t deleted if they are empty
  • Lack of folder view - glad the plug exists for it though

Iā€™m very keen to see SB develop further and incorporate it more and more into my daily flow.

Edit:
Thanks to Marekā€™s comment, there is indeed linking to headings. When I initially tried it didnā€™t work, however retesting in my prod-container everything works as expected

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13

Hi Dan :wave:,
Iā€™m pleased to tell you that we can make links like [[Page#Header]], all the options are on Links

I wonder what lead you to this conclusion, maybe we can make a thread or issue to fix it for the next newcomers? It seems that coming from Obsidian is quite popular

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14

Hi Zef,
i found out about SilverBullet only recently and started to use it right away.
Iā€™m a long time developer who recently turned into scrum master. my memory is not the best so I try to write down everything, been using LogSeq for some time.
while I miss some functionality so far I really love this idea of hackable notes app. if I need something and app canā€™t do it I just implement it.

see you around.

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15

Hi Zef and all
Iā€™m Robin Wilson, from Australia. Iā€™m from an academic background (biologist: systematics/taxonomy mostly). Iā€™m no hacker but like most in my field I do fit the end user programmer model - in pre-Windows days I learned enough awk to filter and report specimen database outputs and have used mostly databases on unix machines and subsets of those data for research projects using Windows software written by and for scientists. But it was a career mistake not keeping up awk/perl skills which would have saved me plenty of time and plenty of Excel headaches. In the past decade Iā€™m back on my ubuntu laptop whenever possible (and I recently invested in a couple of perl books).

Iā€™ve looked into a variety knowledge management software both for professional projects, and also personal interests and needs. Mostly tiddlywiki, in which I built an illustrated glossary for research audiences, which will soon go public. Tiddlywiki is very powerful and more mature than silverbullet and like silverbullet has a great supportive community. But I still find tiddlywiki syntax arcane and always wanted a tool where the data were in an open plain text format, either individual markdown files or even better, csv. I was getting ready to leave tiddlywiki for obsidian when I discovered silverbullet, only recently, either on Mastodon or Hacker News (i canā€™t remember). At first silverbullet deployment seemed a level of complexity i could do without but Iā€™m now up and running with docker and tailscale served from a mini pc with no hiccups. Loving it. (A side benefit has been a transformative upgrade for my music server.) Silverbullet is certainly for me.

Things I particularly enjoy are the elegant UI, the query and template syntax which iā€™m finding reasonbly quick to pick up, and the ability to hop back and forth between silverbullet and markdown files which i aim to generate in bulk for some purposes. And my personal book reviews, previously served up by jekyll on github, will be efficiently absorbed into silverbullet when i have time.

Things i wish for in silverbullet? A few: I wish the frontmatter would collapse out of view when the cursor moves away (just like now with code blocks; obsidian already does this with yaml). Perhaps silverbullet already does it too and i havenā€™t discovered how? This is not trivial for me, since for some project ideas I need many yaml fields which get in the way of non-frontmatter content. More ambitiously I wish silverbullet could use a .csv file with each row a record and each column a yaml attribute. In the meantime, another slick tool, Simon Willisonā€™s datasette, fills this gap very nicely with many added features, especially mapping.

Actually, in my perfect world I would learn one silverbullet-like tool which could draw data transparently from markdown, csv, sqlite, wikidata, and any web source supported by an appropriate API. (Someone is going to now tell me to open up my new perl books.) Iā€™m assuming that since silverbullet uses a sqlite index, performance would still be OK with thousands or tens of thousands of records? The sync delay could be another issue?) I realise this is very far from Zefā€™s use case which brought silverbullet into existence. But you did ask!

I doubt iā€™ll have time to be active with silverbullet, and in this community, for a few months but iā€™ll keep an eye on posts and expect to be back in a while. Thanks for this great software.

bye, Robin

Mastodon: @robinwilson@fediscience.org
Iā€™m mostly silent at the moment on Mastodon but will probably re-use the above post as a belated Mastodon introduction.

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16

Hello, Iā€™m Xavier from Barcelona, Spain. Iā€™ve been using SB for a few days now. I discovered it through the Spanish podcasts of atareao and ugeek. I was searching for a self-hosted alternative to OneNote and have been exploring the available options.

What I appreciate about SB is that itā€™s self-hosted, markdown-based and a PWA, making it convenient to use across all my devices. The treeview plug :electric_plug: is a must for me to keep all folders and notes organized.

Iā€™m currently delving into the theming support. It took me some time to figure out how to change the font and size (thanks to @garyo). I believe that typography and colors, although small changes, can have a significant impact on this type of note-taking software. They might be key factors in attracting users, and once they are drawn in by the visual appeal, they can truly appreciate the incredible functionality, which Iā€™ve only just started to explore.

I have basic programming knowledge and hope to improve my skills soon to contribute to the open-source applications I use. A big thanks to everyone working on it. :technologist:

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17

End user born in the 60s always looking for a fast, resistant and private system for managing my notes.
I have some notions of programming but it is not my job or even my hobby.
SilverBullet allowed me to focus on the notes rather than managing them.

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18

Iā€™m Glenn from Texas. Much like Marco above me, Iā€™m an end user born in the 60ā€™s. Programming is not my thing but I am very much a privacy-focused self-hoster. Iā€™ve been looking for a good note-taking tool that fits my flow and the open nature of Silverbullet has proven to be exactly what I needed. Thank you @zef for creating it!

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19

I am Jc, from France. User of tiddlywiki for several years, but looking for contenders that manage markdown natively, and that have a manageable syntax for advanced topics. New to Silverbullet but it ended up above the competition, so I am now diving in it. Big thanks to @zef for this promising software.

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20

Hi,
Iā€™m Adam and I am a software engineer at a corporate. Some years ago I had a revelation and realized I canā€™t possibly remember everything, so I set out on a quest of trying to take notes that make sense. Along the journey, I tried quite a lot of things, but the ones that I used the most are probably Logseq and Obsidian.

I stumbled upon silver bullet some time ago (a year maybe?), but back then I wasnā€™t willing to let go of Logseq. Yesterday I came across Silver Bullet again and this time Iā€™m giving it the chance it deserves. So far Iā€™m still in the stage where I sort of reinvent my workflows, but I like it so far.

The only thing I struggle with so far are date-based comparisons in queries. I know I can always put together some space script, but Iā€™m putting that off as a last resort option.

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