GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world

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.

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!

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?

> 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

    language:Go path:/flake.nix 

    path:/flake.nix go

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.

  uvx apple-notes-to-sqlite /tmp/notes.db
  # in another terminal while that's running
  uvx datasette /tmp/notes.db

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.

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/

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

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

  llm \
  -f issue:https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/7 \
  -m openai/o4-mini \
  -o reasoning_effort high \
  -s 'Output markdown explaining this issue and the proposed resolution succinctly and clearly'

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.

Sounds like Obsidian but with extra steps.

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.

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

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

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"

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.

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.

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.

Almost the best notebook in the world, as long as there's no outage.

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.

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.

Councidentally I just started using it as my todo list. Its really neat, especially when using githubs cli gh.

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.

Try it with ZenHub atop and it's so absurdly good it boggles the mind why anyone would use Jira

> 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.

Isn’t there something like Obsidian that uses GitHub instead?

How’s the mobile experience?

Call me long in the tooth but it sounds to me like he's describing HTML (sans the backlinks part).

This is insane!

For offline use, these were posted recently:

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

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

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.

Noteplan (https://noteplan.co/)