SilverBullet

on silverbullet

spurred on by a paralogue post touting Logseq, and then by a logseq discussion foum post saying that silverbullet is a rough server-side equivalent, i decided to try it out as a potential sanctum (新聖所?). i’ve been very tempted lately to have a notebook for creative work that’s separate from my full memex, though i’m still undecided as to whether that would motivate me more or even compel me to jump ship?

as for now:

• monospace supremacy lives again
• it’s hard to say if this really has anything that would supplant obsidian for me. it pitches itself on having a potential ability ceiling that just isn’t there right now
• i appreciate the focus on client-side programming, as similar features (through dataview) are entirely what makes liphilai usable
  • i also appreciate how there is enough demand for “tools like this” to make me feel like my notebook won’t become unreadable one day

tentative breakdown

advantages:

• less weighty than obsidian, in many ways (i think)
• quieter interface
• the way it stuffs table of contents and backlinks into the main file is nice (and probably easy to hack into a sidebar if need be)
• much more open about its file parsing structure, which would probably make it much more flexible than what dataview provides
• you can also render queries using templates, so if i decide to e.g. add a new column to the genre indices in [Music by Category] then i wouldn’t need to update every single one.

comparavantages:

• vim mode with the ability to load your own vimrc?! yes pls~
• dataview-ish queries built in and made first-class?! yes pls!
  • and much like dataview, it has its own bespoke language for them
• markdown with wikilinks?! well, i guess that makes things convenient…

vantages:

• not having a browsable file view encourages zettely behavior?
• unsure how well it scales past the 1k note mark, let alone the 10k
• monospace my beloved?

disadvantages:

• gotta bring your own code
  • and hoo boy is the documentation confusing
  • maybe it’s already telling that navigating the documentation feels like wandering through a labyrinth
• no tabs? not even buffers?
  • that’s what your browser is for, if “Editor: New Window” is anything to go by (except it makes a completely new window)
• currently no non-local backups, but something can surely be arranged
• tags might still apply on the per-file level instead of the per-block level, which is one of the things i dislike about obsidian…
  • oh dickie it’s worse… it just doesn’t seem to recognize tags when attached to a header… unless it wants them attached at some other block level?!
  • am… i the problem here? for wanting this feature? a feature which might not even have ever existed?
  • because when i was using org-roam and it had this feature, it was within the context of an outline.
    • “so just code it in yourself lol?” because it doesn’t seem hard to treat a heading-lined text as its own sort of DOM, and then keep that sort of outline as a separate sort of index.

aw you just fucked yourself

or, if i ported liphilai here…

• i would need to convert my info metadata into attributes or yaml blocks for all 4,000+ library documents i have
• relying on empty page links for tracking listen dates would make it complain… quite a bit. would those have to be turned into attributes?

on owning your notes

i think the whole idea of “you own your notes” and “never be locked out of your notes” is kind of fallacious, really. i understand the anxiety of putting all your notes in a format that is no longer readable years down the line, but for any sufficiently popular notetaking tool there will be people creating ways to export files from it. evernote’s .enex is kind of a fuck but it’s such a popular program that others kind of have to support importing it if they expect people to switch over to their tools. i think others work the same way, and there will probably always be a way to reduce one format or another to a markdown(-flavor) export, and therein you’ll have access to your text again.

but does that mean that you’ll have access to how you used to use your notes, in the same way? how many of the features specific to your notetaking program – or the tools you’ve built within it – will you be able to regain?

the text is the text and will always be the text, in the same way that the pages in a book or filing cabinet will always be the pages. but if all those pages were ripped out, scattered, and then handed back to you, then it would still take a lot of labor to reconstruct the pages into a form that makes them as intelligible as they used to be.

so, in order to reconstruct liphilai in another notetaking program, now that i know what it would entail…

• markdown spec compliance
  • all paragraphs that have single line breaks would have to be given backslashes
  • blockquote formattings such as [!quote] would have to be reconstructed
  • wikilink-style page linking would need to be reimplemented or changed for near-every note
    • silverbullet: all wikilinks should include their full paths
  • (this all presumes that the destination will be using markdown too; if not then i’m real screwed)
    • (i tried this with org and i don’t want to go back to that life)
• dataview never die
  • inline attributes demarcated by :: would need converted
  • dates represented by links to the date (whether created or not) would need to be converted to some other format
    • although what i like about the current structure is that, if a diary entry does exist for that date, it links right to it!
  • some replacement for the automatic note creator for media files might need to be made? (though it’s buggy and incomplete – especially for what i listen to)

build your own memex nante

wakatta, wakatta! mou!

i get it though, in that the more open a platform is, the more tempting it is to try to use it to make exactly what you need. because right now i feel like i’ve hardly exhausted obsidian’s limits, yet they’re still present enough to annoy me. and why deal with these when you can bikeshed together something that’s worse but yours?

• for any sort of presentation pages (artist pages, genre indices, etc.), make the queries templates that can be fed variables. that way, updating the template updates all pages that use it.
  • i’d actually really love this
  • it lets you render queries using a template! so you can do this!
  • (and it turns out that dataview lets you do this too, though you need to go out of your way for it)

other meta

silverbullet is very unsubtle about the kind of person it’s meant for. like, the websites for other note apps tend to ease you in by showing off a single concept or two which makes theirs unique: linking, outlining, web capture, plugins. they go for a simple-but-powerful sales pitch, like by fully utilizing this one concept which takes a minute to explain you’ll be five times as productive as you’ve ever been before. meanwhile, silverbullet’s sales pitch has you ramping up into hand-coding queries and templates before the end of the paragraph is even over. it’s the sort of thing that i assume can only appeal to 1) sickos 2) power notetakers who’ve maybe implemented similar workflows but are reaching the limitations of what their tools can provide (so, the sickofied by necessity). i guess i’d consider myself to be in the latter camp, so now just the thought of being able to do what i’ve already been doing but more has me grinning a true sicko grin, glasses fogged over like a fujoshi.

v2: the space lua era

since i started this note in february 2025, silverbullet has officially launched v2, with the key difference being that it’s going all-in on space lua… that is, a custom implementation of lua.

i… uh, um:

1. rolling your own language implementation is gutsy, to say the least… though it’s not like the existing query language wasn’t handrolled either
2. have you already written a lot of queries to structure your space? well they’ve been deprecated now, so get ready to rewrite them all!
3. this project has always exuded cowboy-coded energy, which is fine by me since i’ve always been something of a cowgirl coder myself, and i have a history of happily using similarly-coded applications – see hydrus, see doom emacs. but i know i can’t expect others to share my sickness, either.
   (then again, we already have dozens upon dozens of notetaking apps already. what’s the harm in having one for the sickos?)