Considering migrating PKM Site

My PKM is currently based on Dendron

Main appeal of Dendron was local-first. At the same time, it indeed was loosely tied to VSCode editor.

Over the years, they had a command line tool to create new notes. Still, its strength always was as a VSCode plugin

Then today, I came across Obsidian-Zola

It splits the task of taking notes and publishing it.

• Obsidian for note taking
• Zola for publishing

What I liked about it is Search functionality (To be fair, my current PKM build on Dendron also has it)

I had heard of Obsidian, but never committed to it because publishing is a paid option (Also not local-only option any more, I think) I may not even use Obsidian app to note taking (Or maybe I will. too soon to comment)

Dendron

• ❌ (Mostly) VSCode extension
• ❌ Uses UUID in the URL when published. This makes it harder
• ❌ No good theme support
• ✅ Hierarchical notes taking, and publishing
  • A note with filename as dev.db.pg.psql will be displayed like a tree, just based on the file name alone.
  • I miss this in Obsidian+Zola

Zola

• ✅ Obsidian-Zola supports both Light and Dark themes (which Dendron does not)
• ✅ Zola itself has decent themes support (which I don’t need right now, but could be useful in the future)

For now, I’m migrating my notes from Dendron. What this really means is:

• Remove the frontmatter - which is Dendron specific
• Delete Empty files. These are required for the hierarchical note taking/publishing.
• Rename Notes, so that titles show up as I want, rather than auto-camelcased-from-the-filename 😄
  • So far I don’t know how to add frontmatter, so that filenames are separate from the title

I also ran into problem when running this locally on macOS obsidian-export binary shipped in linux specific. I replaced that with this