#merge
https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/notes/https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issuehttps://github.com/holzschu/a-shell/blob/master/man/man1/curl.1https://github.com/holzschu/a-shell/blob/master/man/man1/jq.1
I used GitHub issues as a form of project management to plan my wedding many years ago. My wife was skeptical at first, but the ability to add labels, search, etc made it really easy to work together and accomplish the tasked we needed in time for the wedding. The hardest part was creating a bookmark that links directly to the issue tracker. Oh, I’ve also used GitHub issues to organize all the boxes in my most recent move. I would create an issue and the description would list all the contents of a box. Then I would write the issue number on the box. After moving, I could search GitHub to find that one thing I was looking for and know what box it was in.
(Not OP) I’ve used LibraryThing for book boxes. Using smallish boxes (30-40 paperbacks each) so that carrying them is not a backbreaker. Scan the ISBN barcodes with phone app, fix old ones/whatever on web app, tag with box number written on at least two sides. No problems found so far.
Because you can’t search that without physically looking at each box. There could be a bunch odd reasons that many boxes remain unpacked; downsizing, temporary housing. It’d be nice to be able to finds the one thing you need (you could even label the issue with the box location!). Anyway, a fun solution but I think it’s more effort than I would have been willing to put in even if I would have appreciated the outcome.
I moved a couple weeks ago, and was quite confused when–after repeatedly searching through every kitchen box–we were missing the flour, sugar, and pasta. Turns out one kitchen box got placed at the bottom of in a pile of book boxes in the living room. If you unpack in a day, it’s no big deal, but if you spent a week unpacking, you may find yourself having to eat something other than spaghetti for lunch, which is normally fine, but not when you really want spaghetti and the lack of spaghetti merely makes you more determined to find it.
I put a colored sticker on each box, where the color corresponds to the room where the box should go. The destination rooms are marked with the same stickers during the move, so helpers have an easy time telling where to put each box. In addition, I’m numbering the boxes, and when packing them keep a list mapping the numbers to what’s in each box. So when later searching for something, I know it should be in box number x. This can be helpful even years later when you don’t unpack all boxes.
> This can be helpful even years later when you don’t unpack all boxes. Indeed, this is one of the biggest reasons I tracked this information to begin with.
I ended up buying spaghetti when I went to the store a couple days later, and now I have an abundance of spaghetti. But lunch that first day ended up being something else.
> If you unpack in a day, it’s no big deal I think you’re supposed to unpack 80% on day one, and keep the rest boxed up for the next move?
Wouldn’t a single text document have achieved the same purpose? With a heading for each box?
Because searching for a thing across all issues is way faster than eyeballing the list written on each box?
Correct. There’s no way you’re going to write every item inside the box on the box itself. And definitely not on every side of the box. Think cables and small items. It only makes sense if you plan on unpacking over a year but if you unpack everything in a couple days then the system is not as useful.
At my last job we almost used Gitlab for all our project management. The only thing that stopped us was not being able to use references between projects. It’s very project focused, which is of course good enough for open source projects. But at my current job Gitlab could easily take over Youtrack, already took over Upsource.
Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1172/ This is a fun anecdote to share, but everywhere you can find people with absurd workflows that are better dealt with using proper tools. FWIW I used Org mode to organize a move to another country. I really cannot stand the idea of feeding my personal information to Microsoft.
Sounds to me like parent used a proper tool. It just happens to be very flexible. In general, the best tool is the one that you use and makes sense to you.
This is fun: it turns out you can paste this GraphQL query: { viewer { issueComments { totalCount } issues { totalCount } } } Into https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer in order to see the total number of issues and comments you’ve posted over your time on GitHub. I got 9,413 issues and 39,087 comments, for a grand total of 48,500 combined!
Years ago I was using GitHub Issues as my personal task manager But ~ 2 years ago I switched to Obsidian for that Eventually I event started used Obsidian for my project management, and ditched GitHub Issues / GitHub Projects With caveats, that I use that for the greenfield project with lots of unstructured exploration + AI agents for keeping design docs and figuring out detailed tasks For the established and legacy projects, I would probably use GitHub Issues for bugs, enhancement requests. And GitHub Projects for all reactive work (support, ops, bugs, etc.) Lastly, I disagree that it’s “almost the best notebook in the world”. It my might be a best ticketing system or a note taking system, but not a notebook in the sense of Jupyter or LiveBook (but nothing stopping them to make code blocks executable[1], and even add some LLMs). Also it’s easy overwrite the content of the issue, even by a single person working from different tabs (at least that was the case in the past). — 1. GitHub Blocks https://blocks.githubnext.com/
I expected the first comment to be about privacy. I don’t keep a lot of notes but I definitely consider them even more private than even email. Not sure I want them training LLMs. Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos?
The amount of extremely sensitive corporate secrets in GitHub issues makes me assume that their security and privacy are pretty rock solid. A lot of companies pay GitHub a lot of money to look after their source code and related artifacts. That’s GitHub’s business model. I don’t think they would jeopardize that trust for the sake of training a model on private data.
Where I work we don’t use GitHub, but we do use Copilot. It took a long time before it was opened up for us to be able to use it, as deals had to be struck and accounts and auth setup to use our corporate logins, which have different rules for data privacy than public use of Copilot. We are explicitly forbidden from using the public version of Copilot, or any other AI for that matter. I can only assume that companies paying for GitHub also pay for enhanced levels of privacy. Just because a company can pay GitHub not to train on their data, doesn’t mean they’re not going to train on your data that is being hosted for free. They are almost certainly crawling all free repos.
I dunno. For one thing, those companies are paying GitHub a lot of money for the enterprise version, separately hosted (right?). The data isn’t actually available to Microsoft employees or LLMs, absent some security flaw or backdoor. For another, companies that pay for this also (sample size is small, though) have automation that scans GitHub repos, issues, etc for any secrets and require them to be removed and scrubbed from history, implying that they don’t trust even the self-hosted GitHub Enterprise as much as you do.
I see secrets as a different issue. Putting those in an issue or repo exposes them to potentially hundreds of people within your own company, that’s bad practice.
I remember awhile back that they were and do train on repositories to the point that I never wanted to use GitHub for anything other than submitting bug reports to projects. Maybe the non-training only applies if you pay protection money? But then you run into the whole if it’s public there’s nothing stopping some other AI that isn’t MS from accessing the repository and training on it.
There’s been a huge amount of speculative information floating around that GitHub are training on private repos, but I’ve never seen anything credible.
Assumptions are not sufficient when it comes to basic human rights. And my assumption is that they do or will use your data from their own interest as the likelihood that someone within Microsoft will benefit tends to 1 as time tends to infinity. privacy needs to be verifiable (Apple has show this is possible with private cloud compute)
> It has excellent search How is it excellent when current logs could do with a bit of redesign doesn’t find the comment (requires quotes to find it) And then a tiny typo “current logs could” do with a bit of redesing also fails you
It’s such a wasted opportunity too. It would be so powerful to understand how a tool is used by searching for popular repositories that are already using it.
Maybe I have my search syntax wrong. Suppose I want to search for go projects with a flake.nix in the repo root. This finds nothing: language:Go path:/flake.nix I know they exist though, for instance here’s one: github.com/joerdav/xc Can you tell me where I’ve gone wrong?
The fact that you can’t even specify the branch or search across branches is anything but excellent
Like many I’ve been looking for the best note-taking app for years. And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown files inside a Git repo.
> And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown files inside a Git repo. Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this workflow, the best app I’ve found is Obsidian + Git Plugin. It works fantastically well on desktop though it does require a little work to get it working on iOS.
Are there options to see the current state of the repo? What I mean is, for example, I like that in VS Code I instantly know the current state because the git sidebar icon shows a notification of uncommitted changes. If I don’t have a visual reminder, I’m more likely to not make commits when I should, and I also don’t want an auto-committer firing after each change. I find the visual reminder keeps me anchored to my git status. Heck, maybe I should just use code for notes. One plus would be web access with code server, since Obsidians only docker image that I know of uses VNC. Anyone compared these two tools and have a decent write up? The biggest item which comes to mind would be referencing other notes and the features built on top of that?
> Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this workflow… If I want to keep this workflow why shouldn’t I just continue using this same workflow?
There are a couple methods - I use Working Copy to manage the git stuff on iOS. Far from perfect, but it works.
a-shell is another way you can do this. Takes a bit of finagling to set up and wire in plugins and the like but is relatively stable afterward.
Compared to something with automatic bidirectional sync between all devices, something where one has to manually commit/push/pull a new/edited note feels archaic.
OTOH you get version history, with commit messages if you care to write them. And the full power of git to explore the history. You can edit the same file on two (offline) devices, then resolve the inevitable merge conflict. “Automatic bidirectional sync between all devices” scares me. How does it deal with merge conflicts? How am I sure I’ll be able to revert to a previous version? Can I see the full history of a file? I don’t know, perhaps it’d be ok. I certainly wouldn’t learn git just for note taking! But, I know how to use my hammer, so everything look like a nail…
But you can still have the full power of git with Obsidian still, since they’re just MD files at the end of the day.
You can automate commits and push on save. I had a similar setup for vimwiki before migrating to a web-based wiki system (dokuwiki).
I thought it would be a problem as well but it turns out I absolutely never edit my notes on two machines at once. The commit/push/pull is done via a simple bash script that I’m running as a build command inside VS Code.
I like it as I consciously enjoy sort of checking in. I also store in a onedrive folder for automatic sync and backup in case I have a crash before I do a git commit.
No webpage. No screenshots. Not even Releases? I’m not trying this app. The readme is more about the technical details of the code than the actual features of the app. Where do I go to see what this thing can actually do? Do people expect me to run the program just to see if I want to run the program?
I did take a look at that, which is probably more than most people would have done, and by take a look I mean a skimmed for images because I’m not reading 2000 words of text for an app I don’t even use yet. The only images I found showed how drag and drop works. I know this is common with projects that think Github is a replacement for a website, but I genuinely wonder how does it get so bad that a 5 year project with 9000 commits and 60 contributors doesn’t have a single screenshot. Nothing personal or particular about this project specifically, just… the whole open source culture of dropping something on Github and not even doing the bare minimum to have other people get to know the project. It feels like such a waste. It could be an amazing project but who is going to bother with it if they can’t see what it looks like?
For me, it’s the same way, except that instead of Markdown, I use plain org-mode files sprinkled with a bit of org-roam tags when needed.
I oscillate between Apple Notes and a bunch of markdown files, which is a pretty painful thing to do. I like how future proof a folder of markdown files is. But I like the design, simplicity, and deep features for capture and media support offered in Apple Notes. The more a markdown app supports extra stuff, the more proprietary it starts to feel, as any app to read it will also need to support those things. A while back I told myself I was going to stick to Apple Notes, as going back and forth to other things is painful, and doing it proactively means more pain, rather than maybe having some pain in 10 years of the app goes away. However, where I am again, in the middle of a largely manual migration back to Obsidian for my folder of markdown files. I used an export, but the formatting is so bad that I need to clean up every single note.
The inability to export, as well as the lack of anything more than the bare basic formatting options (at least at the time a few years ago) pushed me off apple notes.
I’ve been able to export since early, early iPhone. They’re just txt files. Surprisingly, Apple notes have been the most durable as Apple has migrated them from every iPhone I’ve had for the past 15-20 years or whatever. Basic formatting is a plus for me. Although now notes has really advanced formatting and even sketching.
I ended up using Exporter from the App Store. I didn’t work great. I have an export, but there are a lot of issues with it. I’m finding it is often easier to copy the note and use the Rich Text to Markdown action in Shortcuts, then paste into Obsidian. If I spent more time with Shortcuts there is probably a way to automate this way a bit more.
There are plenty of tools for exporting, and I’ve tried to leave Notes several times and had no issue getting the notes out. But trouble free sync between machines, the ability to ‘scan’ documents, adding basic maths support, the ease… it always sucks me back in. I wish it kept the date of creation and edits readily available, and supported markdown. But it’s damn close to what I want. Why can’t Apple Mail do search as well as notes?
…accessed through Obsidian (esp on mobile) – On Android, you can “Open folder as vault” Or neovim with FzfLua (on laptop)
On the last point on Apple Notes: iCloud has the “keep downloaded” option now on iOS and macOS for folders and files. This makes every app that saves into iCloud files behave like Notes, i.e. work offline with automatic online sync.
Not self-hosting and having a cost of zero is one of the features that makes GitHub Issues such a great solution. I don’t want to risk my notes on a configuration error or billing mishap.
My protection against that is nepotism: I’m a “GitHub Star” which gets me direct access to GitHub staff, plus I know a lot of people who work there.
Yeah, I’m writing this for the benefit of people who want to follow your usage. It also means that your advice doesn’t generalize.
Totally fair - if you don’t have a deep relationship with GitHub it’s absolutely a good idea to arrange your own backups in case of your account being suspended!
I mean, there are my local clones. The odds of all my locals crashing at the same time as GitHub seem to be the same as local+github+sourcehut+whatever crashing.
https://codeberg.org/ says “Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.” Wouldn’t hosting my own private notes on there be against the spirit of what they’re trying to achieve? I have no problem at all freeloading off GitHub!
Totally agree. GitHub issues is probably the best bug tracker/ticketing system you can imagine. Intuitive interface, simple, clean, and fast. Just waiting for a Microsoft redesign to completely fuck it up. :P
I’ve used plenty of proprietary issue tracking systems and GitHub is missing several features that I now consider quite important though certainly not essential: * The ability to write an issue summary separate from comments. When you are debugging some hairy bug, some manager doesn’t really want to wade through all the comments to get an idea; an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders while others continue to comment on details. People work around this by editing the initial comment of the issue but it’s better if there’s something more dedicated. * Sophisticated access control. More than once when someone writes a bug report they are referring to a bug experienced by a single user. For user privacy reasons there needs to be a per-issue permission system to restrict access beyond the permission implied by the repo. * The ability to add personal notes to an issue without publishing it. Whether it’s a draft form of a comment or something else, it gets rid of the need to maintain your own notes.
Every experienced dev knows what happens when they are subjected to issue trackers with loads of features: some managers require all those features to be used (cause that’s what they paid for!). So instead of spending your time debugging you have to ensure the bug is properly tagged, categorized, has the right version number(s) for affected software, has the right assignee, yadda, yadda. Then some busy beaver will send you email reminding you that you haven’t filled in all the drop-downs and check boxes correctly….
1. Summary It wouldn’t be too hard to add that with a 3rd party plugin. You could set an event hook to run through the comments, and add it to the top comment. For bonus points, you could use an LLM to summarise. Every company loves a bit of AI these days, so your manager can gloat with his manager buddies that you now have AI-powered issue tracking. 2. That sounds like an anti-pattern to me. There shouldn’t be PII in your dev issue tracking system. There problem here isn’t RBAC, it’s the workflow. If you’re in a situation where you need to make notes of sensitive information then you should store that in the same data store as the source information (eg Salesforce, et al). And I say this as someone who hates Salesforce. 3. I’ve not seen this feature in any issue tracker. Sounds like a nice feature but I wouldn’t have thought it as essential.
> That sounds like an anti-pattern to me. There shouldn’t be PII in your dev issue tracking system. Then how do you track such issues? I’ll give you a real example I’ve experienced: a high-value customer writes to support and complains that his UI is broken. None of the other people’s UIs are broken. Do you not use the issue tracking system just because you need to get that customer’s private settings and PII in order to debug the bug? It’s common to require PII to be stored elsewhere, but people will still make mistakes and copy paste PII for convenience. In the end isn’t it better for your issue tracking system to be flexible enough to store PII?
You can say user ID is broken and define how it’s broken. You don’t have include any of their PII outside of the user ID. > It’s common to require PII to be stored elsewhere, but people will still make mistakes and copy paste PII for convenience. That’s a training problem. And It’s also common for people to fuck up RBAC. The latter is a harder problem to fix with training than teaching them to keep PII out of issue tracking systems. > In the end isn’t it better for your issue tracking system to be flexible enough to store PII? I’ve worked in some very sensitive domains. They managed just fine keeping customer data out of the issue tracking systems.
The user ID is a piece of email. It is PII. To define how it’s broken is to describe a list of specific actions the user did to the private information in their account causing the UI to be broken. If training is such a problem, I don’t understand why we solve the problem by obviating such training and make the issue tracking system an acceptable storage medium for PII?
Because you were the one that said you needed granular RBAC to limit who has visibility of what issues!
3. ServiceNow incident tracking has something close called “work notes”. Work notes are for internal team members with a certain role, where comments are public and meant to communicate to the issue reporter.
> an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders I would hope this will soon be written by AI automatically; summing up high-level points in an issue discussion seems like a perfect task for an LLM.
That reminds me: GitHub has a bad habit of hiding comments in a long issue. It displays the first few and the last few comments. So you can’t expect an extension to grab the entire context without it specifically being designed for GitHub. In fact even the browser’s built-in Find In Page won’t find everything.
Isn’t the entire purpose of Azure DevOps to be a sort of Jovian gravity well into which Microsoft marketing principles can be sucked into before they hit GitHub?
It’s already locked up behind a login wall. You can only search for a handful of issues before being quickly rate limited.
Forgejo does almost everything Github does around issues that the OP mentioned(I think). * It doesn’t extract the title from the issue on bare linkes, instead the url will become something like:
Is one of those extra steps “not pay $50 a year to have access on all your devices”, or maybe it’s “not pay $100 a year to access via the web”?
I thought it supports most file storage sync solutions? I’m using with the free iCloud level storage I believe.
Sure, but then you can’t access it on windows or android. Or the web. I’m responding more to the comment that it’s extra steps. It’s clearly not as good a solution as obsidian, but there are no extra steps for it being accessible over the web or to all your devices - not just those for the devices built in cloud provider.
I use obsidian on iphone, Mac, Windows and ipad. It syncs using icloud free tier. I don’t have to pay. icloud is available on Windows as well.
If windows or android is a must then use something that has a client in them. I use OneDrive because it’s the cheapest in my region. It’s got terrible support from Microsoft, just lazy and terrible, but there are third party sync solutions for all platforms. I think GitHub/gitlab issues is totally viable. Obsidian/Logseq too.
Does onedrive work now for syncing obsidian on iOS? I don’t think it did when I last tried a year or so ago.
If it doesn’t, you just need to find one that does. I use it because I don’t care about iOS. If you need one that supports iOS, macos, windows, Android and Linux and there isn’t one, then it’s justified to pay for their sync solution. Or just use GitHub/gitlab issues.
I have access on all my devices through my email provider WebDAV. I don’t pay anything to Obsidian for this (but I do donate to them because it actually is the best notes provider, in my opinion).
So I guess the extra step is “not install and configure a 3rd party WebDAV plugin for all your devices while ensuring you have WebDAV support by your email provider”?
I guess so. I’m personally not getting bogged down in extra steps or not. I simply don’t trust GH to keep my personal note data for me, it’s much too valuable. It looks like it is possible to backup GH issue data… with some extra steps…
I gladly pay those fifty bucks. Creating good applications require hard work. (I wouldn’t say Obsidian is perfect, but so far I haven’t found any note-taking application that I like more.)
I’m not denying that obsidian is a better solution, just pointing out to the parent that there aren’t “extra steps” to the described solution - it is exactly what it is - but you need to add paid features (8$/m) to obsidian in order to get web access.
No you don’t. You can use your own web-hosting or web-syncing solutions. I just use Git. There’s an excellent (and free) plugin on Obsidian exactly for this reason.
Does this plugin let me export Obsidian notes as a website? Would you happen to remember the name?
Also with Github you can have a private repo for free with which you can host and sync your files.
I never said Obsidian doesn’t require extra steps to setup sync without paying. Do you happen to know one that also allows you to save locally and have back-linking features?
Obsidian sounds like text files with extra steps, but your point remains, plain text files are great. There’s multiple solutions from keeping them available across devices.
The extra step is to open the text file in an editor, except in this case the editor is called Obsidian. Granted, you do have to install it versus using the default editor that comes with your operating system, so that is an extra step. But most people don’t use the builtin editors from their OS anyway.
Well yeah, Obsidian is basically a markdown editor with some nice extra features. And apparently a quite thriving plugin ecosystem.
And unlike Obsidian, online only. Can you even backup GH issues? If not, that’s surely got to be a deal-breaker.
Can I host obsidian myself? I would like to use it for work, but I don’t want to expose my employer to potential data leak. I’m thinking, host it locally and just let one drive act as back up for the mark down files it produces?
As others have pointed out you don’t “host” Obsidian - it’s just a local collection of markdown files. But if you’re asking about a self-hosted alternative to “Obsidian Publish” for creating a knowledgebase that others can answer, I’m Quartz[0], a static-site generator designed to turn Obsidian markdown files into a website. I’m building and it and hosting it on Gitlab Pages at work[1]. [0]: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/ [1]: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/hosting#gitlab-pages
I recently went through this effort and I’d say it’s worth it. In particular, I’ve used the “Self-hosted LiveSync” plug-in + docker.io/oleduc/docker-obsidian-livesync-couchdb, and I setup all my infrastructure within a VPN (with Tailscale, this was pain-free). I knew about using just git, but having Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android, it was just way easier to use this solution instead of fighting with git-like apps for each OS.
Ten years ago, I worked in a small non-profit development shop that used Github issues for all project management. Checkboxes were used as both subtasks and ACs. Now that I think back, it worked really well. I don’t think we even had Slack (we used Google Talk).
I’ve come to the same conclusion myself in the past 2 months (possibly driven by the AI / LLM age making me think even more in version control… writing those words make me wince). I have a small webapp too, which hoovers up issues I like to publish, from a repo with links on the web I like that I feel I would like to share (I believe the kids are calling this ‘new age curation’). Its really quite a nice, organic, process. And its so odd its taken me 15 years of note apps - every other hot note app on the market - to realise this. Love Simon’s articles, another nice insight
I always wonder when I see all these best notebooks / note taking systems, etc. why people don’t spin up any of the dozens of wiki servers. You can put it online so you can get to it anywhere You can run it off a stick to keep it with you (Tiddlywiki) You can cross link pages to be able to collect things together You can search. Some even have auto link builders so you can build a page of links to pages that match a category. Some support Markup so you have formatting the way you want.
For me, I like to keep my life simple and not run servers unless I have to. I haven’t run a wiki in years because markdown+git is good enough and simpler. I never really need anonymous edits.
For a typical organization, I think issues are still the most valuable part of the GitHub product stack. You can build very powerful project management abstractions on top of issues & labels. If you have discipline to do a monorepo for the entire organization, your issue and code tabs are effectively the entire universe in one place. This is the only thing I’ve seen that can pull middle managers out of email - a single bucket that has everything of concern in it.
Broken links with 404s have been called “a feature, not a bug” of the web, but I think that for internal documentation purposes, having consistent bi-directional links is a very good thing to have.
The stuff that gets upvoted here… Next up: - "SQLite is almost the best notebook in the world" - "Claude is almost the best notebook in the world" - "An SQLite database containing only Markdown files in a Git repo self-hosted on an SD card in my Raspberry Pi served by a Node.js web app accessible via 56k modem is almost the best notebook in the world" - "I created a startup to take the previous thing, reinvent GitHub Issues on top of it, call it AI Notes, and make almost the best notebook in the world, and it's now valued at $50B"
Councidentally I just started using it as my todo list. Its really neat, especially when using githubs cli gh.
Except if you lose your 2FA one day before you need your plans. Or are all plans public? Any local notebook, including pencil and paper, is better.
Pencil and paper is terrible because you can lose the paper. I want my notes backed up to the cloud, with backups replicated across at least two continents. I’ve experimented with a bunch of tools for extracting copies of my issues and pulling them down locally, which is easy thanks to the GitHub API. One that’s particularly fun is a GitHub Actions setup that copies the full contents of each issue thread into a file in the repo itself. Then I can “git pull” to fetch my backup! I still don’t have any of them running on a cron at home but I might set that up some day.
the notes app… there is none. There will always be better apps, but you need to stick to an app with its flaws and limitations. I have been through this rabbit hole… (paid for Bear, IAWriter, noteplan, FSnotes and probably more that I forget) and have just stuck to local markdown files and use VS code … I even used LLMs to generate a tiny plugin to solve my micro needs.
So GitHub notes let me do what Zim Desktop Wiki let me do since 2005 without requiring internet. But I get the OP, if you live in GitHub, it makes perfect sense.
> Free and unlimited Extremely doubtful. The fact you haven’t yet hit limits does not mean no limits. Nor does the fact the provider claims unlimited.
That’s why I wrote this. The idea of using GitHub Issues as an alternative to a dedicated notes app is decidedly non-obvious. I only just realized myself that I’ve been using it that way for years.
Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-nail thing. You should care more about the UX. And that somewhere, someone wrote a parser for the file format. That’s it. You don’t have to understand every byte of it. It need not be readable text and it need not be version-control friendly. It should be a joy to use, be powerful, be easy to annotate images and pdfs. I bet none of the Markdown solutions do this as elegantly as OneNote or alternatives.
The more time passes the more I care about my notes living in Markdown: - I can transform it to other formats should I need to - The GitHub variant of it (GFM) has feature like syntax highlighting for different languages which is incredibly useful to me based on the kinds of notes I take - Diffing clearly genuinely is a benefit, sometimes I want to know exactly what I changed! - I can parse it with regular expressions, so useful information doesn’t end up locked in some weird binary format - LLMs are great at reading and writing it These things may not matter to people who are not nerds. I’m a nerd!
Indeed, Markdown has become a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts: You want to use it because the toolchain and ecosystem surrounding the format is good, and the toolchain and ecosystem are good because everyone is using it.
… and why are those subscription fees so obscene? I guess too many people have too much money…
Sure. But it’s worth it for me. It’s really great. And i have full control over my files. It’s not hosted by them. Just markdown files