Nyxt browser annotations beat pen and paper

https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/annotations.org

by pedrodelfino • 4 years ago

166 46 4 years ago

nyxt.atlas.engineer

Later, the tags will be useful because Nyxt also offers features related to information retrieval. Hence, the user can search or filter their highlight and comments.

Will future Nyxt enter the zettelkasten space?

ssivark2• 4 years ago

It's not about Nyxt "entering Zettelkasten space", since it's philosophically not an island "app". It's a well designed tool with powerful interfaces to pass data into and out of the application.

For example, some power users already integrate Nyxt captures with org/org-roam, so it's "already" Zettelkasten friendly, in a sense. Whether the devs plan to branch towards that, I have no idea, but it should be already possible to integrate Nyxt with org-roam (maybe even some spiffy interfaces like the one demoed in OP).

ipnon• 4 years ago

It's kind of like how EMACS isn't a text editor, it's a platform for writing editor macros (Editor MACroS). Nyxt isn't a browser, it's a platform for writing browser macros ($CLEVER_ACRONYM).

weikju• 4 years ago

“Bromacs” obviously (ducks, just kidding, etc)

drekipus• 4 years ago

Me: becomes enlightened

gobengo• 4 years ago

Let me know if you would be interested in developing a bit more to this nyxt browser feature to support persisting these extensions via the W3C Web Annotation protocol - https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/

I've been wanting to write an implementation of an annotation server, and it'd be cool to immediately interoperate with nyxt browser. Then I'd work on the same server supporting most other browsers (e.g. Firefox) via WebExtension API building on my old https://github.com/gobengo/web-annotation-extension

cyanydeez• 4 years ago

i wrote up a white paper a decade ago imagining a wikipedia like 9verlay on websites that would add a meta level of user interaction. just takes some advanced fingerprinting of the annotated content and some social media like subscription and blocking mechanism. it was called _wikilay_

qwertyzxcvmnbv• 4 years ago

There's also https://web.hypothes.is/

codazoda• 4 years ago

Having never used Nyxt, I’m curious. Is the context lost when the page changes is the future, or does Nyxt capture it in time?

culi3• 4 years ago

See also: PeerLibrary[0]

[0] https://peerlibrary.org/

culi3• 4 years ago

Something I've always wanted to work on was a browser extension that allowed things like this to happen collaboratively. There's stuff like PeerLibrary[0] that lets you annotate things as a group, but it's limited to publications and things you upload. Nyxt seems to meet what I want but lacks the collaborative aspect I'm looking for.

There's a couple of Browser extensions that have sorta tried to accomplish this before. Epiverse[1] seems to be the most polished one so far. It originally intended to allow any user to comment on any webpage. But it found that without existing content, few found it useful. So eventually the creator just parsed to see if the webpage was posted on Reddit or Hackernews. The original purpose of it ended up being too expensive to host so it ended up just becoming a HN/Reddit parser. Which, tbh, is basically what I want to build at this point. I'd love to contribute to the project, but I don't have much time and it's closed source

The other similar extensions also just parse HN/Reddit like Newsit[2] (which is open-source) and Thredd[3] (which only parses Reddit). My only real addition to this is that I'd like to include the ability to parse more than just Reddit and HN. I wanna create a discussion aggregator. There's similar sites like Lobste.rs and Lemmy.ml that could also be parsed, but obviously that's not the full extent of where discussions happen around a webpage.

I don't think I have it figured out, and I don't know if anyone ever will, but I think there's a lot to gain if someone is able to someday harness that feeling that you get when you read something really good or find something really cool and wanna see how others responded

[0] https://peerlibrary.org/

[1] https://epiverse.co/

[2] https://newsit.benwinding.com/

[3] https://thredd.io/

tgbugs• 4 years ago

In case you are unaware there is https://hypothes.is which might fit the bill. It has the same issue with sparseness of annotations that you mention for epiverse, but I don't see any way to avoid that.

culi3• 4 years ago

Oh yes, I totally forgot to bring that up. I think somewhere along the way my goals changed from "collaborative web annotation" (which hypothes.is is the best at out of what's out there) to "discussion aggregator." I think the latter was partially born out of a realization that I'd end up making #YetAnotherDiscussionPlatform. Now I have to figure out how to include hypothes.is annotations into my app lol

srcreigh• 4 years ago

Maybe try some of these

https://genius.com/web-annotator

https://www.getpoint.co/

joeman1000• 4 years ago

I’m getting excited thinking of the possibilities of combining this with org-roam…

V1ndaar• 4 years ago

Yeah, I'm wondering in what way it's already easily possible to export those annotations to org. That would be amazing and a reason to finally give Nyxt a proper try.

depingus• 4 years ago

Excellent, excellent addition. This is so useful. For people who haven't tried another way: turns out nested folders inside more nested folders is a terrible way to organize your bookmarks!

I've been using the xBrowserSync extension to handle bookmarking across browsers; it also uses tags / descriptions + search for organization and recall. Its made a huge difference. But Nyxt now takes things even further; locally saving a copy of the page you're annotating. Great job!

3np• 4 years ago

For people who haven't tried another way: turns out nested folders inside more nested folders is a terrible way to organize your bookmarks!

Depends on the person I think. My mind is intuitively comfortable with graph/tree structures. Despite having used Gmail since beta, I was never successful in leveraging the label/tag+search structure into something manageable. It was always chaos despite recurring attempts to tame it.

Having switched to self-hosted IMAP with the traditional directory approach, I feel in control of my e-mail for the first time in over a decade.

Similar experience with bookmarks.

Great that you found something that works for you but I think it's a mistake to believe it's possible or desirable to have one structure for everyone.

Had similar thoughts in this thread, where so many were arguing if "users love settings" or "users hate settings", and which settings are loved or hated. Stop assuming you can reduce every human into a single profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181291

(Apologies if I come off as projecting at you here, just got triggered a bit after yesterday)

walterbell• 4 years ago

Doug Engelbart's work on augmentation/annotation from 1960's through early 2000's, https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/358/000/

adamddev1• 4 years ago

I'm curious to try out Nyxt. But I see it's not built on Chromium or anything like that. How robust is it at handling random edge cases on the web? Does anybody run into issues where you need to go back to another browser on some pages? (I face this with Firefox even, unfortunately)

ssivark2• 4 years ago

Nyxt currently uses a WebKit renderer, and can in principle support others too.

https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/technical-design.org

yewenjie• 4 years ago

I last tried Nyxt three months ago. While it was okay on text-heavy sites, I had a jarring experience in media heavy pages like YouTube. I switched back to Firefox but gonna give Nyxt another try soon.

erwincoumans2• 4 years ago

When I read pdfs, I upload them to Google Drive and make annotations there. For other stuff, likes on HN and Twitter or snippets emailed to myself makes info persistent. If Nyxt was a browser plugin, I would try it out.

dafty4• 4 years ago

Just curious what PDF annotation tool(s)/setup you use?

erwincoumans2• 4 years ago

After you upload a PDF to Google Drive, you can select text and add comments. That way, you can share the PDF and its comments with collaborators/colleagues etc.

Helmut100012• 4 years ago

Since a while, I have a no-app principle for any note taking or knowledge organization. Where _app_ is anything not directly provided by file systems or text-files (e.g. .md, .txt). After countless of deprecated app experiences in the last 20 years, I am happy to have switched to a more solid base, so the knowledge I produce is not lost when switching OSs, app versions, formats etc.

Seeing the functions of Nyxt, they look exciting and perhaps I will try this for short-term knowledge (e.g. brainstorming on a topic, where I won't need to access this knowledge again after e.g. one year). For everything else I will stick to nested folders and markdown files, where compatibility is almost guaranteed.

Curious what others think about this issue.

christophilus• 4 years ago

I’m the same. Fountain pen + notebook, and neovim + markdown. I think in markdown, now, and get annoyed when I have to compose (e.g. emails or whatever) in a crummy rich text editor.

guerrilla• 4 years ago

So what do you use on Android? My Markdown-based note taking app was just deprecated.

Helmut100012• 4 years ago

I have an internal Nextcloud Server that I can access through VPN/Wireguard. The Nextcloud android client can edit files (either in plaintext, which I prefer, or markdown rendered mode). For when I have no mobile internet access, I use Markor [1], installed from F-Droid. The files in Markor are synched to Nextloud, when online or in home wifi again.

[1] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.gsantner.markor/

JackMorgan• 4 years ago

Obsidian for cool UI and fast entry, and Vim running on Termux for longer form entry with a keyboard attached. Then git on Termux for syncing.

madacol• 4 years ago

Markor

Grumbledour• 4 years ago

Markor + Syncthing are the way!

unfocussed_mike• 4 years ago

Apart from the fact that I include Apple Notes in this... yeah.

(Mostly because it is suitably ubiquitous -- it's an operating system feature for me.)

As I consider moving to a more low-budget dev environment again I do question whether I need to jump the remaining step to text files in some cloud storage. But I'd want immediate background sync (not having to wait for the note to arrive on a device or explicitly fetch it).

trenchgun• 4 years ago

You can use Nyxt to take notes to markdown, though. It's just a quick script away.

eitland2• 4 years ago

If someone wonders why old Firefox users, while still preferring new Firefox to anything else, is still annoyed then this might be a perfect example to explain it:

There used to be a number of extensions of this type on old Firefox. I cannot remember exactly this one, but here are a couple to prove what was possible [1]:

- the original Firebug which became developer tools and was cloned to every other browser was just another Firefox extension(!)

- an extension I used a lot was Scrapbook, which let me crawl and store websites (I used it for symfony docs back in 2007-2009 before mobile broadband was available or at least not within reach for me. It would download pages recursively according to simple, useful rules like maxrecursion, only subdirectories and only a certain domain and then rewrite every url on the page to be relative instead of absolute. You could also edit the pages locally.)

- Alerts (or something similar) would check web pages according to simple rules I set up and notify me if it saw significant changes.

[1]: somebody will probably tell that it existed too and was even better, I just didn't know of it.

medstrom• 4 years ago

But it's interesting that Nyxt is planning to to have WebExtensions in addition to their own extension system. Feels like the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that maybe didn't occur to Mozilla back then (but I don't know the history). The unspoken presumption that it had to be just one system.

eitland2• 4 years ago

Agree.

The Orion browser that I like very much takes a similar approach: they let you install both Firefox and Chrome extensions.

Hopefully they and/or Librewolf will start providing APIs that will let us create even better "native" extensions for those browsers.

mgirkins• 4 years ago

I am currently building a similar tool to this called Conote (conote.page). Conote lets you highlight and annotate by simply pasting in a url instead of downloading a browser. You can therefore have discussions with others based on your annotations by sharing the link with them.

Conote is currently in early beta and there are a lot of rough edges eg. it currently only supports Chrome and Firefox desktop to create highlights (soon to be fixed). I have plans to add much better knowledge retrieval searches etc but for now am focusing on making the core ability to add context to your thoughts.

I welcome any feedback you might have :)

bovermyer• 4 years ago

If I take notes on something I read on the web, it goes into either my Obsidian offline notes or into the knowledge base on my website.

I assume that any given useful website may be gone in a month. This may be a holdover thought pattern from the 90s, but for me if it's worth knowing, it's worth writing down in my own system - which is app-independent, and could be printed from the source files without loss of information, should that become necessary.

Oh, and if the page author is here - please, reduce the resolution of that painting image. It's unnecessarily massive.

narrator• 4 years ago

Why not use mediawiki for this kind of thing? Wikipedia will never die, so the software will always be around.

hassancf• 4 years ago

My process is:

1-Store the information very quickly, without typing any additional text, so no tags and no annotations

2-Retrieve the information based on some word I might remember from the previously saved text or based on an approximate date

#1 happens a lot so I don’t want to spend time annotating or tagging information (ie click save and forget…)

#2 is much less frequent and when I really need the info, I can spend a bit of time to craft my criteria for a search

Making #1 laborious or painful is a nonstarter for me. Anyone else on the same boat?

throwamon• 4 years ago

I'd realy like this to work for me, but my memory isn't that good. So what ends up happening is I often can only remember paraphrases, or I can only remember the media type (e.g. video, blog post, repository)... I'd kill to have a system that allows you to just save content like that and then apply all sorts of such "soft" filters ("hints" or "guesses" instead of verbatim search).

dandanua• 4 years ago

Retrieve the information based on some word I might remember

See, your memory is using some words as index to access stored information. And it's indexing it asap (well, some re-indexing probably happens when we sleep). Thus, I don't think an efficient digital memory extender can work without active human participation in indexing. Otherwise, it will produce a lot of garbage.

Meph504• 4 years ago

Clip to onenote, and onenote in general is a pretty amazing tool, it allows for everything I saw in the demo video, but has a interface that makes it much quicker to accomplish those task.

If you have access to the office 365 ecosystem, I would recommend checking it out (which that said, I strongly discourage the use of the native window10 version of oneNote, its a dumpster fire on wheels)

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 4 years ago

But the links will change/go extinct in a few years. You need to copy the content locally if you want to preserve the knowledge.

Nyxt browser annotations beat pen and paper

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