Adding in some feedback here after a few months: I made the jump from Foam to Dendron.
I really liked how open Foam is to adaptation to exactly what you want, but I found that the things that Dendron brings that Foam lacks are a few more batteries:
- If you have two notes on two different angles in the same topic, Foam doesn’t proscribe any way to differentiate between the two. It’s up to the user to name notes in a way that works for them.
By contrast, Dendron comes with the notion of a hierarchy. Every note belongs somewhere in some hierarchy. You still come up with them, but the structure is helpful for having a place for everything more naturally, and without the need to constantly refactor your notes or resort to files named with opaque IDs. - Dendron has VC backing that is giving more momentum to the founding team to build something great and competitive, but it’s still VSCode and open source on the basic level. Foam hit some bumps in the road with the community maintaining it, whereas dendron has a clear view of how to get there.
- Dendron includes all the stuff Foam can do, and more around maintaining a lot of notes. I’m confident that I really can get my data in and out of Dendron, whereas Foam made it easy to add stuff but not as easy to find what I was looking for without doing a full text search. The hierarchies really do help a lot. Dendron makes it easy to rename hierarchies, too, without much difficulty.
I would definitely recommend Dendron to anyone that’s already in VS Code and wanting to get started in note taking like this.
I have multiple windows/workspaces open. Each workspace has a set of enabled/disabled extensions to keep it all clean and orderly - so dendron only runs on my dendron workspaces. I have two VSCode workspaces open for two different dendron projects that should be completely separate. My primary workspace is my day to day coding environment. They all stay on different desktops, making it easy to focus on the task at hand but still having my notes in reach when I want them.
All things considered, I think that the only meaningful advice in building a system like this is “Start”. Start writing, start playing with it, explore ideas, and build something that works for you.