Hi Bill,

Thanks for your comments - I am glad you like the articles!
I have tried Scrintal, Roam, Obsidian, and Logseq. I don’t know Heptabase, but I’ll have a look. A key selection criterion for me is not to have a “vendor-lockin”, i.e., I want the data available as clear text so I can transfer the data to another system in case the company goes out of business or a clearly better alternative appears. I expect flat text files on a file system to outlive me :-), which is not the case for many of the various tools. Software tools come and go and new ones are typically better, but your are a bit in trouble if you can’t easily transfer data from one system to the next. Imagine you clean out your attic and find important data (e.g. a homevideo of your child’s first steps) on a betamax tape…
I have chosen VUE for three reasons. 1) It solves my need -drawing concept maps as the articles describe, 2) it stores data as XML, which is a clear-text encoding of the map, and 3) it is open source so I can maintain it. I imagine I will switch if either java is no longer supported on Windows PCs (highly unlikely) or something significantly better appears on the scene (more likely, but probably not open-source).

Best regards,

Rasmus