FAQ

All the questions we thought you might ask.

General

What is a Dendron?

A Dendron is many things.

1. Dendron is the greek word for tree. It’s a reference to the hierarchal note taking that Dendron(3) enables.

2. Dendron is another word for dendrite which is an extension of the nerve cell that sends and receives signals in the brain. Think of Dendron(3) as a digital nervous system that helps you consolidate all the information that you care about in the fastest and most efficient way possible.
   • Image by Quasar Jarosz at English Wikipedia
3. Dendron is a local-first, markdown based, hierarchical note taking tool. It is meant to help you organize, manage, publish, and collaborate on knowledge bases of any size.

How is Dendron different from X note taking tool?

Substitute X with roam|obsidian|foam|one note|evernote|...

Dendron is focused on helping you organize your notes inside your knowledge base.

All note taking tools (try to make it) easy to get notes in. Its getting it back out again that’s hard and it becomes harder as you get more notes.

Whether you are using notebooks tags, or backlinks, once you have more than a few hundred notes, you’ll need to have some sort of structure in place (eg. naming convention, hierarchy, etc) to keep track of it.

Dendron is a highly opinonated note taking tool that focuses on hierarichal note taking. It provides the freedom of Roam’s every note exists everywhere philosophy while layering on top flexible hierarchies to keep track of it all.

While Dendron works with knowledge bases of any size, it really shines once you’ve accumulated a few hundred notes. I created it to handle my personal knowledge base of 20k+ markdown notes - Dendron lets me track and find any specific note in it in seconds.

How does Dendron help me track my notes?

1. Dendron organizes and collapse all your notes into managable chunks using hiearchies.
2. Dendron helps you manage your hiearchies using schemas
3. Dendron gets out of your way when your working with your notes during lookup

Dendron’s secret sauce is that it provides the necessary tooling for you to work with hierarichal notes. While hierarchies have traditionally (and justifiably) gotten a bad, I would argue that this is because the tooling around hierarchies were bad, not because hierarchies themselves are bad.

Hierarchies are one of the most effective ways that both humans and computers process large amount of information (there’s a reason why almost every database is built from a variation of the b-tree). You can find further details about hierarchies in this blog post

Is Dendron Free? Will it stay free?

Dendron, the client, is free and will always remain free. It is also open source so anyone is free to make their own fork of Dendron.

That being said, I’m all in on Dendron and this is my full time gig. I want to make sure that developing Dendron remains sustainable. To that end, I plan on introducing value add server side functionality that folks may pay for. Examples of paid for features include:

• private hosting (for folks who want to publish but not use github pages or want to add authentication)
• enterprisy things
  • eg. on premise installations of Dendron with single sign on, active directory, and fine grained permissions
• offering private subscription based vaults (eg. think substack but having people subscribe to vaults instead of newsletters )
• server side IFTTT like functionality (eg. everytime I add an entry to airtable, add a note to Dendron)

Working with notes

Why markdown?

Markdown lets you write text in a simple human readable notation that is platform independent. You don’t need to have microsoft word to read a markdown file and now a days, all new note taking tools support importing and displaying markdown.

For more context, you can see the original markdown declaration here

Can I use Dendron with existing notes?

You can use Dendron with existing repositories of markdown notes.

Open the Command Bar in vscode and use the Dendron: Change Workspace command. It will ask you for a folder path as input.

Dendron will create a dendron.code-workspace file in specified directory and then open the workspace (if a workspace file already exists, it will use that). It will also create a root.md file in that directory if it doesn’t exist (currently this is part of the internal working of dendron).

Dendron does not delete or overwrite any files during the Change Workspace operation.

How do I save?

Dendron automatically saves when you change focus (switch tabs or applications). You can also manually save using CMD+S or CTRL+S depending on your operating system

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