Jason Crowther

Silver Bullet Notes

· Jason Crowther
notesobsidiansilverbullet

I’ve been using Obsidian for notes for the last few years. I don’t have any specific objections with it, except that it runs pretty slow on my older MacBook Pro (which runs cachy linux these days.) The primary copy of my Obsidian vault lives on my Mac, shared via Google Drive. I also use Obsidian on cachy with rclone. It mostly worked, but the initial connection/sync operation was super slow. This pushed me to try the paid Obsidian Sync. It made all the sync problems go away and it was way faster and smoother than rclone.

Lately, I’ve been on a quest to migrate from 3rd party managed services to using locally hosted apps and managing my data more directly. I’ve already tackled git (formerly used github, now gitea) and passwords (formerly used 1password, now Bitwarden). Getting both running with docker wasn’t hard and Claude helped me write some solid scripts to back up my data locally.

Hmm, are there any good notes alternatives? I had Claude built a list of recommendations based on some criteria: open source, can run with docker, native clients for mac, iOS, and linux (or decent web interface), notes stored in markdown for portability.

Silver Bullet quickly bubbled to the top. Ok, lets give it ago.

The original thought was to run Silver Bullet on my home server and later set it up on my cloud server if it made the grade. Claude pointed out that the user authentication in Silver Bulletin is nothing fancy and I’d probably want to put it behind another stronger authentication scheme (like one of the various 2 factor authentication proxies) if I planned to key anything confidential in my notes. Yeah, I probably will put confidential stuff in my notes, so need to think a little harder about security.

My home server is on Tailscale, so its got its on private IP address that only other devices in my Tailnet can access. All the places I’m gonna want to use Silver Bullet from are also on my Tailscale network, so I think I can get by with just the built in authentication in Silver Bullet as the general internet can’t route to my home server.

So, installed Silver Bullet and started messing around. Silver Bullet more like Obsidian than I would have guessed. I’ve used only the web interface so far, but here’s some feedback:

Things I Like:

  • Its fast. Searching and editing notes is super speedy.
  • You can do everything from the keyboard.
  • Quick Notes. Easily kick off a new note named with a timestamp for capture.
  • Query language. You can easily build your own filtered lists. I messed around a bit was able to put together a new home page with an Inbox for Quick Notes and Recently Modified notes lists to be able to jump back into what I was doing.
  • VIM motions.

Things I Don’t Like:

  • Can only open one file at time. I thought this would be a deal breaker for me, but after using Silver Bullet for a few days, I’m sorta ok with it.
  • Theme stuff is very DIY. There’s no theme picker currently and only a handful of decent themes. Thankfully, there’s a catppuccin scheme.
  • Might be imagining it, but there are some times where the tree view doesn’t update after doing a file operation (renaming, deleting.)
  • There’s a limitation (or bug?) with file names that multiple periods in them. You can see them in the file picker and tree view, but they won’t open when you select them. I ran into this when I brought over my data from Obsidian and where I had a few dozen files named like weekly.yyyymmdd.md.

Things I Didn’t Try Yet:

  • Fancier programmatic stuff you can do with Lua.
  • Tags. I normally don’t use tags for notes.
  • Data Objects. Do fancy query stuff using embedded data in in-lined data objects and front matter.
  • PWA support.

I’ve been using Vivaldi lately as my browser of choice. On Mac, normally I like Safari, but the version in MacOS Golden Gate is slow and buggy. I use workspaces in Vivaldi to keep project areas separate. It works better than you’d think but I’d like to keep Silver Bullet available in all my workspaces and there’s seem to be a way to do that efficently (you can pin Silver Bullet in each workspace, but they’d all be separate tabs behind the scenes.) Claude suggested I try Vivaldi’s webpanel feature; its like a sidebar for your frequently used apps. Turns out that works great.

I think I’m pretty happy with Silver Bullet for now. I haven’t opened Obsidian in a few days and don’t think I miss it that much. I haven’t turned off Obsidian Sync yet. I’m gonna give it one more week, in the off chance that the honeymoon period with Silver Bullet abruptly ends.