compare / dendron

tnotes vs Dendron

VS Code extension for hierarchical Markdown notes named a.b.c.md, in maintenance mode since February 2023.

Dendron’s idea is that a knowledge base should be refactored like code. Notes are named by their place in a hierarchy, so project1.tasks.task1.md is the child of project1.tasks.md, and all of them sit in one flat vault folder. Lookup (Ctrl+L) finds or creates notes by that dotted path, schemas type the hierarchy and apply templates, and Rename Note or Refactor Hierarchy move whole subtrees while rewriting every wikilink that pointed into them. Every note carries YAML front matter with an id, title, created and updated; Dendron warns when it is missing.

The extension is the product, but it is not the only entry point. @dendronhq/dendron-cli runs dendron note lookup --query hello --output json and dendron note write --fname mytest --body "..." against a workspace without VS Code, and the same engine publishes a vault as a Next.js site.

The state of the project matters more than any feature. In February 2023 the founder announced on Discord that the company had pivoted, that “Dendron, the extension, will no longer be actively developed” and that the project would be in maintenance mode; the README links to the GitHub discussion that reproduces the announcement. Pull requests are reviewed on a best-effort basis, the last commit is from June 2025, and the extension still installs and works, but nothing new is coming. Anyone choosing Dendron in 2026 is choosing a finished tool.

Feature comparison

✓ yes · ~ partial or via the file system · ✗ no

Using Dendron and tnotes together

A Dendron vault is a folder of .md files, so tnotes can open it, but two Dendron conventions collide with tnotes’ rules:

• tnotes takes the title from the first non-empty line. Every Dendron note starts with the --- front-matter fence, so tnotes ls shows --- as the title of every note and the YAML shows as text in the editor.
• tnotes renames a file to a slug of its title whenever it saves. The slug of --- is untitled, so editing project1.tasks.task1.md in the tnotes TUI, or with tnotes append / tnotes write, renames it to untitled.md (then untitled-2.md, and so on). That breaks Dendron’s hierarchy and its links.
• [[project1.tasks.task1]] does not resolve: tnotes matches links against titles and against slugged file stems, and the slug of a dotted name has dashes, not dots.
• #example.my-example is read by tnotes as #example; tags stop at the dot.

So use tnotes read-only on a live Dendron vault (ls, search, cat never write), or convert once. This turns the dotted hierarchy into folders and the front-matter title into the first line:

src=~/Dendron/vault; dst=~/notes
for f in "$src"/*.md; do
  stem=$(basename "$f" .md)
  out="$dst/$(printf '%s' "$stem" | tr . /).md"
  mkdir -p "$(dirname "$out")"
  awk 'NR==1 && $0=="---" {fm=1; next}
       fm && $0=="---"      {fm=0; print "# " title; next}
       fm && sub(/^title: */, "") {gsub(/^"|"$/, ""); title=$0; next}
       fm {next}
       {print}' "$f" > "$out"
done
tnotes "$dst"

project1.tasks.task1.md becomes project1/tasks/task1.md titled from its front matter. Wikilinks still contain dotted names after this; rewrite them to [[Title]] with a second pass or leave them and let alt+enter create the missing targets as you go. Front-matter tags: are dropped; add #tags in the body where you want them.

FAQ

Sources

Dendron facts checked on 2026-09-22 against:

• Dendron README (maintenance notice, features, Apache-2.0 license)
• GitHub discussion #3890 reproducing the February 2023 announcement
• Dendron wiki: note CLI (dendron note …, --output json)
• Dendron wiki: front matter, tags and hierarchies

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