I normally use Joplin for my notes and drafts. But since I planned to write something a bit longer I decided to give other tools a try.

I had specific ideas: I knew I would be gluing bits and pieces of text together because it would be written incrementally, not in order, and I did not know what the final ordering would look like. Therefore something that would let me arrange text into blocks, show/hide them, and rearrange them would be handy.

Logseq and outlining

I knew of outlining, but I wouldn't say I liked most of the tools I saw, and I have no reason to prefer OPML. Still - why not give it a try. I heard good things about Logseq and it was nice initially - it let me write chunks of text in markdown, 'zoom in' on specific chapters, and most importantly, rearrange things, even if I didn't love the editing experience.

What finally made me abandon it was the same thing I didn't like in other outliners: it kept every paragraph in a 'list', and it was messing up the rest of my flow when I exported it.
The final goal was always to have a long Markdown document at the end. While Logseq does let me export to markdown, it always exported everything in an unordered list, and I found no way around it.

Instead of:

# Heading 1
text
more text

## Heading 2

I got:

- # Heading 1
- text
- more text
- ## Heading 2

Which I plain didn't like, and it messed up my workflow.

AFFiNE

"AFFiNE is a workspace with fully merged docs, whiteboards, and databases", their landing page says. It wants to compete with Notion, Miro, AirTable, and the like - but it's self-hostable and works offline. I have installed it on my server and gave it a try.

While I appreciate that it also has a Windows app, it seems to suffer from the issue I recently saw in multiple open-source projects: you can self-host, you can download a desktop app, but you can't use the desktop app with your own instance, only with their official cloud offering. I never know whether this is done for nefarious reasons or not - after all, if the app is still in beta, maybe they just didn't get around to implementing that. But maybe it's just a way for them to boost their sales and divert people from self-hosting. I'm also not a fan of cramming "AI" everywhere, but it wasn't too intrusive.

I really liked the idea of writing text in smaller 'articles', and using a mind map (or something similar) to organize them. Making an editable map of nodes that each link to an article would have been nice.

And that was the reason I only spent a single evening with Affine: in their current state, they did not support linking between objects. Sure, maybe they will, they haven't reached 1.0 yet. But this is one of the most basic features of editing/note-taking tools and I can't use anything that doesn't have it.

Back to Joplin it is

After some time I just went back to Joplin. I can't see the text in a single long article, nor can I rearrange sub-sections as easily as I could in Logseq. But I can make a folder, make each big chapter into its separate note, and reorder them as I need. I can dump new links or snippets into notes and move them later. I also know the resulting markdown output will be exactly as I need it.

Both Affine and Logseq look like they might be great tools - but they didn't fit what I tried to use them for.