Logseq is a free and open source note-taking app that I started using during the summer of 2024. After using it for a few months, I give it my recommendation! Whatever that’s worth.

Before Logseq, I was using the Notes app in Nextcloud, which stores your notes as plain-text markdown files, just like Logseq. This made switching was super easy. Logseq prompted me to create a new notebook, and I just selected the folder where I synced all my notes to, and just like that they appeared in Logseq. While it defaults to using Markdown, which I’ve been using, but it also supports Org. Logseq has its own Markdown extensions which are unfortunately non-standard, but you can kind of see the influence from Org. The ones I noticed the most are these:

• Everything is a bullet point. This was annoying at first, but I found it actually helps structure notes pretty well, although it does make existing documents display a little weird.
• [[ and ]] is used to link to other pages in the notebook. This makes notes easy to traverse, as well as allowing them to appear on the graph.
• For some reason, # also seems to link to other pages or… something? Not actually sure what it does.

Overall, learning the software was very easy. It refers to bullet points as ‘blocks’, which are displayed as plaintext while you are editing them and rendered when you are clicked out of them. It has a graph view, where you can view your notebook as a web where each node is a page and nodes link to each other using your [[links]]. I found this to be a fun way to find my notes, as it is 2d instead of 1d like the sidebar in Nextcloud notes. I also typed TODO into a page while making a To-Do list, and realized that it automatically showed all my tasks at the bottom of that day’s journal page! Speaking of which…

A cool feature Logseq has that I did not know I needed is the journal. It’s a super simple feature, it basically just generates a new page every day that is displayed to you when you open the app. My first thought was to disable this feature, but after trying it out, I actually found that the feature is quite useful! It has made me realize the value in keeping a journal. I use it every day to capture interesting thoughts, and to organize my tasks for that day. This feature is pretty much the reason I am writing this article right now. Funnily enough, this article was actually drafted in my Logseq journal! I copy and pasted the file into WordPress and did some editing, and I had a blog post in a lot less time than it normally takes me to think one up.

Also, Logseq makes a great task-tracking app. You just type NOW or DOING and the journal page automatically updates with your tasks. You can even set-up custom ‘queries’ for creating custom project management systems, but I haven’t found a use for that yet.

I know a lot of people at my school who use Notion, and recently the robotics team I’m on had all the subteam leads start using Notion as a project management system. I personally dislike Notion for a lot of reasons, mostly that it’s slow and has an overwhelming number of features. It’s a tool that lends itself very well to building complex knowledge management systems with a team. Logseq on the other hand, has a very simple workflow that works by default, and if you want to do something advanced you can use it’s advanced features like query loops. It also has an optional mini-scripting language that allows you to search your notebook automatically and organize the information. Since Logseq runs locally, it’s also a lot faster than many of the other cloud based note-taking apps I’ve used. It is an Electron app, and honestly it could be faster, but it’s not slow enough to grind my gears.

The Linux version at this point in time has an annoying bug where it will sometimes fail to render your graph, but you can fix it with these commands:

rm -rf ~/.config/Logseq/GPUCache/
rm -r ~/.var/app/com.logseq.Logseq/config/Logseq/GPUCache/ # Flatpak Users

Other than that, Logseq’s pretty good!