I love the idea of Notion, and I love what the team is trying to do, and I love almost all of Notion.
Unfortunately, it's too slow, at least for me. For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible, and Notion (for me!) is just a bit too annoying for me to put up with after extended usage.
If you value features over snappiness, Notion may be great for you though. It's an amazing concept! And I certainly understand why they'd choose the tech stack they did...
Joplin, obsidian, etc. and other open source note systems I've used all suffer from the same problem: bad writing experience.
I can't be the only one who believes this...writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards.
And I like the idea of markdown! Of course I want the ability to export to markdown for portability to the web. But for the love of god, don't make me surround my words in 4 character markup to make them bold, and then show me a second panel next to it so I can "preview" what bold looks like. Didn't we already solve this with 1980s word processors?
Hell, why don't we create a 3 panel writing view? On the left you can write in binary, in the middle you can see live base64, and on the right you can preview what it will look like to actual humans. Awesome!
The only good implementation of writing in markdown I've seen is Typora or Bear, which abstracts/fades away the markup after you type in a single view.
Notion also solves this by only allowing you to select from semantic HTML styles (ie. H1, H2, H3, etc) but you see what the final text will look like in one view. When you export, generating markdown is trivial since you're already using a markdown-esque set of options to style your text.
The whole point of Markdown (in my opinion) is that the formatting is a function of text that you can see and edit. The entire state of the document is visible, and there are no formatting operations you have to learn, just regular text editing operations like backspace, copy, paste, and so on. For example, if you press backspace, you always know exactly what the result will be: it will delete the character to the left of the cursor.
This is not so in rich text editors; when you press backspace, it changes both the document and invisible internal state, and you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen; you need to be aware of the invisible formatting structure, or perhaps a recent history of things you did, or it might be entirely impossible to tell because it depends on some invisible state that was created weeks ago and saved in the document file.
For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power (you can only do a limited set of things like headings, lists, bold, and italic).
That's why Markdown tools that hide the markup are, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds: you sacrifice formatting power, and you sacrifice editor predictability. After the markup is gone, how do you edit it? How do you unbold something, or change the indentation of a list? If there are separate commands for all that, then there was no point in using Markdown.
Markdown isn't just text though, it also does images. Which is when the argument about rendering falls apart IMO. I really would like to see the image i am working on. Describing a chart/graph when all i see is  isn't really that great.
> there are no formatting operations you have to learn
I see it as the opposite. If you give a 2 panel markdown editor to any non-developer human they will be baffled at how to do any formatting with it. Rich text editors are intuitive, that's why they've dominated computing for the last 30-40 years.
> you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen
Huh? In rich text you see what everybody else will see. In 2-panel markdown you need the second panel to see how your final text will look to the rest of the world because you can't predict that easily when writing in an esoteric markup.
> For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power
I wouldn't call requiring a second panel to preview how the actual text will look predictable or simple. It's a rube goldberg machine. On the other hand, I think the best thing about markdown is the restrictions to formatting. It forces you to write in semantic HTML.
IMO, Notion, for all its sluggishness, nails this part. They provide the intuitiveness of a rich text editor, while restricting the amount of styling to a markdown-esque set of properties so what you write will be easily portable to the web.
The mentioned Bear and Typora solve this by showing you the "raw" Markdown at least when your cursor is there. So anytime you edit, you're editing in text, as you mention. But you don't need a second "display" panel to do that.
Both tools do it differently. Typora shows it when your cursor is there, but otherwise hides the Markdown. Bear always shows the Markdown but applies the corresponding style to it.
I think you express the precise reason why I prefer markup formats like Markdown, ReDoc, and LaTeX. I get to write markup which completely eliminates the need to click around menus and buttons or do app-specific keyboard shortcuts for formatting.
Rich wysiwyg editors also seems to have issues where the visible editing and internal formatting state breaks or behaves in weird ways. Like when you insert links and it automatically formats it as a link in some cases, and not in others.
Edit: Personally I always though the split view was okay as long as the compile times weren't too bad. Having a markup editor and then a view of the result is what I do for coding, so why not when writing stuff as well.
Typora is great. But I also tend to use it in "source" view where I can she all the markup.
The point of markdown is literally that things don't hide. Wanna know if that semicolon is included in the italic styling? You will see it right away. Wanna know if a link has an old URL or is pointing to a weird domain? You see it.
This alone makes it worth it. Forcing the whole thing back into a WYSIWYG-editor will just mean that markdown becomes unreadable. A bit like when people used MS Word to write HTML.
> I can't be the only one who believes this...writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards.
It's called markup and a matter of efficiency. With richtext I need to mark the Text and click some button/menu-item OR learn a gazillion shortcuts for every little syntax-function. With Markup I use the same keys that I use for writting text, because the syntax is internal to the text, not some hidden external thing.
Of course it's possible to make a hybrid, something that displays richtext instantly while still working with syntax. But this is hard and cumbersome. Nonthless, Obsidian has it on their list as a longterm-goal, so maybe in some years we will see it.
> With richtext I need to mark the Text and click some button/menu-item OR learn a gazillion shortcuts for every little syntax-function.
Cmd-B for bold is exactly the same number of keystrokes as shift-8, and is exactly the same amount of cognitive load to learn. (You can also apply styling both on selected text and for text about to be typed, unlike plain text environments like this textfield I'm using now where you can't do shift-8 on selected text.)
When you get into the more esoteric syntax, it's still a tie: look how often even Gruber gets the Markdown link syntax wrong, and he designed it.
FWIW, Joplin allows you to have a single panel "raw markdown" view, and you can just assume it'll all render the way you want, and maybe double check at the end. I find that works well for me. As you say, previewing what bold looks like offers minimal value. :)
Joplin also has a beta single pane WYSIWG view which is like, I believe, Typora or Bear (markdown in the backend, but you type in what is effectively the preview window). I haven't really tried it out yet though. If it works well though, it might solve your concern though.
Slack & notion make me close my eyes while typing, just because the delay between key press and pixels lighting up is so long that I get confused. It's like speaking with a 400ms or so echo of yourself being played back. Hugely distracting.
When writing longer things on either, I find myself firing up vim to copy paste afterwards, just because it's impossible to get into any kind of flow in these apps.
VS code also falls into this category by the way, albeit less severe.
For notion specifically, the total lack of keyboard navigation within a page (PgUp/PgDown, Space, Shift+Space, nothing works!) as well as the fact that wherever I click I will make immediate changes to the document (even if I just want to deselect some text or so) just makes the editing hugely frustrating, slow, and anxiety-inducing.
Seriously, if one day I wake up and write my boss that I'm outta here, notion and slack (and asana...) are way up there on the list of reasons.
I'm sure you have some efficiency built into your life that makes you more fragile.
(I don't use vim/emacs etc.) But you're saying that running water is a not a good idea because what if you have to go and get water from the well every day when the water stops running. You'd be so annoyed...
> Slack & notion make me close my eyes while typing, just because the delay between key press and pixels lighting up is so long that I get confused. It's like speaking with a 400ms or so echo of yourself being played back. Hugely distracting.
That reminds me of this blogpost [1]. It's definitely possible to optimize the input latency of rich text editors in the browser: they just have to be close to the metal of the 'contenteditable' browser api.
Oh this makes so much sense now, thanks for sharing. I only recently had to look into react for the first time (not a web dev at all) and was shocked by the depth of call trees and render processes for even simple tasks.
No wonder these things are so unusable. But I guess slack know who they're targeting? People who won't notice the latency because when the pixels show up they're still busy finding the next key to press, or trying to find the right button for the text formatting... /s
I feel all of this is why email is dead. It's not because Slack or anything killed email. It's because Gmail (and other web clients) killed email. They made it dreadfully slow to do anything in. Go download Thunderbird. I haven't used it in 10 years, so it could be worse today. But I remember it being a joy to use. Or the Agent usenet/email reader.
It’s funny that I recently started using the Mac desktop mail app and outlook app and they are so quick compared to gmail (or outlook.com).
I had forgotten how nice it was to quickly go through email and remember how quick gmail was when it launched. A colleague said “it’s just five seconds to open and load an email, that’s not a lot of time.” But that adds up.
That’s an extreme amount of time… GMail and Outlook are both horribly slow and I can’t understand how anyone wants to use them. Outlook even manages to be slow with their desktop app. Not as slow as either web app, but still a noticeable delay.
how do you open an email in 500ms even locally on your desktop? do you use spotlight or something to find and open it? asking since even when i am in thunderbird, it takes me way longer than 500ms to open an email
More than 500ms to open an email? One that's already stored locally?!
If that is the case, I advise you check what's taking so long, I get nothing like it with my thunderbird setup.
Given, I disable html formatting where I can, that might make a difference. But even on my 2009 i5 desktop with hdd storage it doesn't take that long to load the actual email.
It takes me longer than 500ms to find that email.
if we are talking about browsing a list of emails already on the screen and i can simply use a shortcut to go to the next email, that is instant in thunderbird/gmail.com
/fastmail.com. that just isn't my use case most of the time.
opening an email is always longer than 500ms, rendering it isn't in any system i use. hence i am not sure what we are talking here. if we are talking opening, then the 3seconds initial bootup of gmail isn't worth talking about imo.
the bottleneck for me at least is always finding the email and thunderbird is by far the worst unfortunately.
Email started "dying" long before GMail even was a thing. AOL and ICQ startet it, Twitter and Facebook continued it and now it ends with Whatsapp, Slack and Discord. And I doubt that Whatsapp/Facebook/Discord are significant faster than Gmail or Slack, so this can't be the reason.
E-Mail is just a transport-protocol, poor in ability compared do other solutions and rather complicated, especially when it should be made safe.
Whenever I read a comment that says "email is dead" I feel it is my responsibility to point out that ~it doesn't have to be this way~
The email standard(s) are great. Powerful, decentralized, and damn near universal. It's just that we live in a world where a Duopoly has taken over most of what we consider to be email.
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Totally agree. As a software engineer, I was always excited to try new notes apps and to "really stay organized" this time. But I always ended up falling back on either Apple Notes or Sublime because everything else was too slow.
Decided to build an app where it's fast to start writing but is also set up to keep your notes sane over time. The app has a built in scratchpad where you capture notes in small chunks, like texting yourself. Then you triage the notes into categories later. https://youtu.be/xRxn4iiWZUM
Haven't used it in a while, but I always found Trello to be extremely snappy. Once of the things I really liked about it, and that competitors like ClickUp and (more tangentially) Notion are missing.
I really appreciate trello and it’s fast enough as long as you don’t need to open multiple cards side by side. Trello is optimized for certain workflows, in board view or single card view.
In a text editor, you would just have multiple windows, panes, splits ... and it’s just fast to jump, reference, copy/paste, etc. On trello, you need to reload the full board in another tab or lose context.
First time I've seen Joplin--can it handle multiple users partying on the same pages at the same time?
EDIT: apparently not, according to [ https://joplinapp.org/conflict/ ] -- that's a bummer, it rules it out for my use cases :/ I really don't think a filesystem-based sync mechanism works great for a collaborative tool, which is much of the value of Notion to me. It seems really cool for single-user, never-shared stuff, though.
Agreed with the slowness. I absolutely love using Notion, but my #1 complaint is that time-to-note is too slow. I wish that were a northstar metric for them. One thing Notion excels at is allowing me to refactor quick notes into increasing levels of structure, but that first step of getting information into the system from my brain is the biggest gap.
As someone who wants to replace a bunch of stuff in Jira with Notion I have never really perceived performance problems, but I guess it isn't the snappiest.
Is no-where close to the completeness (and complexity) of Notion, it works as WYSIWYG editor, no Markdown.
But it is very fast (hosted in Europe but underneath does basically nothing), with search, free if you don't want to pay, and it will stay since I host my personal notes on it.
It seems to me that we need local and sync for this to work well. Make your changes locally and either sync behind the scenes automatically or when you push 'commit'. Many applications (like notion and a bunch of the other browser based applications) go the cheap SaaS route. One central database behind a web service and every frontend only displays an instantaneous view of some part of the data. That's not collaboration - you want to be able to work offline (at high speed) and then sync when you are ready. Multiple people should be able to work on the same artifact at the same time (and deal with conflicts at the point of the commit). While the sync works well for google docs, I think the experience of working on a single shared resource is bad. (All part of the problem we are trying to solve over at https://terminusdb.com/ - giving a native versioned DB so you can build collaborative apps)
agree wholeheartedly - trying to solve that problem in a general way so nobody else has to have the headache (but, as you can imagine, there is a lot of complexity and detail in getting to something general and usable)
> For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible
Friction can be at different levels. All text editors especially the ones we are used to are friction less when we want to quickly open a new file and jot down something. But then, many higher levels things you want to do with chunks of text are not straight forward. You'll have to use plugins or write your extensions which sort of do what's required, but then they become clunky.
Doing the following things in a text editor is very clunky
1. Drop files from a file browser
2. A wiki that you'll stick to and not want to switch every month.
3. Write reasonably large documents that you'd actually also read in a text editor.
4. Have the same experience on all devices
5. Tables that are pleasing to the eye.
6. Visuals cues that enhance understanding of the content.
7. Select a bunch of text and convert them into pages or todos or tickets.
Page load, painting, uploading, everything. It's all very very slow. I use Notion very heavily at work, and until March of this year personally. In early 2020 I switched to Roam and I can't go back now. Roam is so amazingly fast it's like they're cheating or something. I wish every app would adopt the way Roam does it. Load everything up front.
But, everything is slow these days. Aside from Roam, HN and maybe a handful of native iOS apps, I can't really name any app/site that I use on daily basis that isn't painfully slow.
Roam takes a while to startup. Once up, it's quite fast to switch between pages. A bit like an IDE. It's still browser based I think, and there are no native apps for Android and iOS. So I feel constrained when I'm not at the desktop.
Notion mobile apps are quite good, so I never have to tell myself I'll do something when I go to my desktop.
It solves the same problems for me. Because Roam is almost like a markup language, you can make it do a lot of what Notion does. Especially if you use Notion purely as a personal wiki + task manager.
Notion is much better for businesses IMO. Like I said above, I use it for my startup. Specifically for task management, and even for our public docs site, ex: https://docs.haekka.com/
A bit of everything. Nothing is SUPER bad, it's just always, always a little slower than you'd expect/hope. UI lag and page load are the big ones. Not terrible, just...you can tell it's a big pile of JS written by a team that has prioritised features and graphical design over raw performance.
I think it is all relative. Notion feels so much faster than Quip. Quip takes forever to start, stop, search, etc. it is nearly unusable. Search in Notion is so much better too.
Maybe I should avoid anything faster than Notion so I don’t get spoiled.
I've never understood the draw of Obsidian. Their website makes it seem like the "graph view" is their big differentiator, but why is that useful? Why is it useful to know how various topics are vaguely related, and view a giant web of it? Or is their marketing just confusing me.. and really it's just a markdown editor with linking?
Linking is a big thing in knowledge-managment. There is a new hype weaving around ATM to rediscover functionality which exists in old tools for decades already. Graph-View pokes in that area. Similar reasoning for the tag-view and search.
But Obsidian has more points speaking for it. It works on local files/folders with well known types. No special formats involved which lock you in. Recently it started development of it's plugin-API which already started gaining some useful plugins from the community. And overall it's quite polished and userfriendly, not many quirks and corners which stay in the users way.
Graph view sounds ideal Zettelkasten but in practice the graph becomes chaos once you get to a certain number of notes. It's more useful to have a local view of a notes' links and backlinks, like https://traverse.link/ does
there’s a style of note taking called zettelkasten, recently popularized by a service called Roam Research, that is ALL ABOUT linking notes together and traversing the note graph. obsidian is targeted at that use case.
I've been waiting for their apps to be snappier and have better offline support for almost 2 years. I'm so glad to have found Joplin. It also supports E2E encryption so damn well. Support for plugins was also recently added and that's a big plus.
I had no doubt the top few comments would be critical of the post as usual... but Joplin? I can't wrap my head around this one. I've used Joplin for years and I can't figure out how it would replace Notion.
I wasn't using Notion for it's collaboration features, but as a personal wiki/knowledgebase/note taking application.
Basically, I want an app I can run on my desktop and phone, I can shovel every random thought, link, idea, code snippet, etc. into it, and I can find it quickly.
Joplin does this. Notion does this. Notion also has a lot of other features Joplin does not, true, I just didn't care about any of them. :)
Have you ever tried using that Wiki inside of Microsoft teams? If you want to talk about slow.. dear lord, it's like every action I do is manually being forwarded to a country with cheap labor to approve my action before it's approved in the dtabase.
Whoever is on that product team is either grossly incompetent or terribly understaffed. It’s one of the worst wikis I’ve seen. (Sorry if you’re reading this MS employee!)
I wonder about that and came up with incompetent or team bloat. Since there are so many single person passion project wikis that are OSS, I can’t understand how even if they had a single decent dev working on this it could suck so hard.
I think that the wiki in Teams is not intended to be used but is rather there to tell someone in a position to buy who wants a wiki, but doesn’t use them, that the product has a wiki.
I tried using it and just basic stuff like linking to the wiki from various places is so difficult. I think the (incorrect) assumption Teams makes is that users are super stupid and only use Teams and nothing else, and only use what they are explicitly trained to use.
Unfortunately, it's too slow, at least for me. For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible, and Notion (for me!) is just a bit too annoying for me to put up with after extended usage.
If you value features over snappiness, Notion may be great for you though. It's an amazing concept! And I certainly understand why they'd choose the tech stack they did...
...but I'll stick with Joplin. :)