🌎 A Silver Bullet?

When is a wall of text not a wall of text? I don't know, when it's rendered in a browser, maybe?

Most of my notes from the last 5-10 years are plain text Org-mode files, edited in Emacs. I often try to wean myself from Emacs and Org-mode simply because it can feel like I'm stuck with one tool and one kind of file for my notes. 

Markdown long ago won the Betamax/VHS battle of plain-text formats, so using Org-mode can feel like I'm just being stubborn at this point.

I've tried nearly all of the Markdown-based note taking tools. They all have their good and bad points. The 800-pound gorilla is of course Obsidian. Obsidian is probably the Right Answer™ for most people, but it's not for me.

During a discussion around Obsidian recently, I was introduced to a lesser-known app in the space: SilverBullet.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one where your notes are more than plain text files? Where your notes essentially become a database that you can query; that you can build custom knowledge applications on top of? A hackable notebook, if you will?

If my goal was to have a "hackable notebook", I'd keep using Emacs, but while testing SilverBullet I noticed something else: I was simply using it to write my notes. I didn't spend time thinking about which plugins I needed or how my graph looked. I just wrote and linked more and more notes.

SilverBullet is quite hackable. Maybe more so than Obsidian, especially by end users who aren't also plugin developers. But I don't really care about that yet. This feeling is new to me :).

SilverBullet is a PWA (Progressive Web App). Editing my notes in a web browser feels weird, and yet I keep doing it. There is something nice about having everything just a pinned tab away. The drawback is that it needs to be running somewhere using Docker or Deno. I'm running it in a Docker container, via OrbStack on my Mac Mini, and accessing it from elsewhere using Tailscale. It sounds worse than it is.

I'm still trying to understand why I'm using SilverBullet by default for notes. It wasn't planned, and it seems like an unlikely solution. And yet here we are.

—Jack Baty