GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world

[styfle]

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.

[paulryanrogers]

Why not just write what's in the box on the box?

[klez]

Out of curiosity, what other solutions did you explore and why were they lacking?

[sph]

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.

[INTPenis]

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.

[rzzzt]

I remember seeing this house renovation project on HN, but it is gone from GitHub: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962518

[simonw]

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!

[cogogo]

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?

[simonw]

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.

[fsflover]

> Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos?

Related discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184948

[eviks]

> 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

[sureIy]

Confirm. GitHub search is "search" not "excellent search"

[fbnlsr]

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.

[_fat_santa]

> 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.

[frou_dh]

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.

[trevinhofmann]

Might be worth trying this free and open source note-taking app (disclaimer: client of mine).

https://github.com/cybersemics/em/

"em is a beautiful, minimalistic note-taking app for personal sensemaking."

[miroljub]

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.

[al_borland]

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.

[chrisweekly]

Strong rec to keep using markdown files in a git repo -- and start using Obsidian to edit and manage them.

[exe34]

org-roam inside git

[msravi]

...accessed through Obsidian (esp on mobile) -- On Android, you can "Open folder as vault"

Or neovim with FzfLua (on laptop)

[triknomeister]

I have an idea. Coming soon!!

[Jakob]

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.

[greggsy]

How does it handle contention, and how frequently does it sync?

[nsonha]

is iCloud still downloading and reuploading again if you drag things between folders?

[bjourne]

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

[kccqzy]

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.

[hugh-avherald]

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?

[soraminazuki]

It's already locked up behind a login wall. You can only search for a handful of issues before being quickly rate limited.

[xeonmc]

Alternatively, you can use Codeberg to avoid vendor lock-in, or self-host Forgejo.

[simonw]

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.

[nivertech]

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/

[Tepix]

The missing feature is federation! In my view, centralized structures like a giant source repository such as github are something we as a developer community need to avoid. Unfortunately, features like federated merge requests in gitlab ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14116 ) are something we've been waiting for for 9 years and nothing seems to be happening there. This feature alone would enable a lot of new collaboration without forcing everyone to work on a centralized system to use git - a decentralized versioning system - with high efficiency.

Last week, Microsoft cut off the email account of the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, after being ordered to do so by the Trump administration. This is merely a week or two after Microsoft did a big PR campaign, telling the European Union how they were to stand up against this administration if the need arises. The irony!

Trump isn't hiding his opinion about the EU. What's stopping him from ordering Microsoft to block the EU from accessing github one day? Right now: Nothing at all. Think about how it would impact your business and open source software in general. We must not put all our eggs in a single basket.

[j_maffe]

Sounds like Obsidian but with extra steps.

[supermatt]

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”?

[Cthulhu_]

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.

[nsteel]

And unlike Obsidian, online only. Can you even backup GH issues? If not, that's surely got to be a deal-breaker.

[pipes]

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?

[_mikz]

Don't forget the checkbox list! And linking to specific comments.

[hliyan]

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).

[zie]

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: <group>/<repo>#15 Which isn't as nice. So issue #15 in repo tootie/mynotes would look like: tootie/mynotes#15

* It also doesn't do offline sync.

I think that's the only thing it doesn't do. I use Git Touch on iOS and it seems decent enough, you can get to issues and update them, etc.

The bonus is, assuming you run your own Forgejo, or trust whoever runs it for you(say Codeberg), you don't have the MS privacy concerns.

[yearesadpeople]

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

[jtwaleson]

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.

[0xbadcafebee]

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"

[bob1029]

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.

[AstroJetson]

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.

[Propelloni]

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.

[OutOfHere]

For offline use, these were posted recently:

https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue