a logseq alternative: the daily page, written in sentences

shizumu is a private writing app, and a logseq alternative for people who liked landing on an empty page each day and stopped enjoying the outline. you write in sentences, the writing stays on your device, and the code is open source. what you pin comes back onto the page when you return to the project it belongs to.

a page in shizumu: one document holding a flowchart, a recipe, a bash command and a decision, with the trail it belongs to and its pins above a page in shizumu: one document holding a flowchart, a recipe, a bash command and a decision, with the trail it belongs to and its pins above

how the two behave

logseq is an outliner. every line is a block, blocks link to each other, and the graph is the payoff for keeping the links up. the journal page is where you land, and the work is the linking: deciding which block refers to what, and pruning the graph so it stays useful.

shizumu is a page of writing, not a tree of blocks. you write the way you would in a letter. nothing has to be linked for the page to be worth something tomorrow, and the way back is the pins you kept, not the references you remembered to make.

who it fits, and who it doesn't

if your thinking happens in block references and queries, and the graph is where ideas meet, logseq does that well and you should stay. shizumu fits the person for whom the graph became a second job: the daily journal was the part they loved, and the bullets started deciding the shape of the thought before the thought was there.

platforms and sync

shizumu runs on linux (flathub, x86_64 and arm64) and windows. android is a closed test on google play: ask to join. mac is a beta download and iphone is a testflight beta. the app is free, and the writing is a database on your device.

sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted. the relay holds what it cannot read, and neither can we. hosted sync is free on two devices, and a relay you run yourself is free on every device: pricing and the deploy guide. the relay sees sealed blob sizes and timing, never content, titles or filenames: the threat model and how sync is encrypted. the client is apache-2.0 and the relay agpl-3.0-or-later.

moving over

logseq keeps your notes as markdown files, and there is no graph importer here. what carries across is the text: paste a markdown page onto a page and its headings, lists, tasks and code come in as blocks. the block references and the graph stay in logseq. on the way out, shizumu writes every page as a markdown file into a folder you choose, plus a full backup of the database, so leaving is as easy as arriving.

what a page does instead

a new page starts empty. you write to think. what turns out to matter gets pinned, and a pin is a pointer back to the page it came from, with the writing around it intact. a trail is for a project, not a day: a book, a job search, anything you'll come back to tomorrow. choose a trail and the pins you already kept there are on the page. everything else lives in memory, searchable by date, by trail, or by a word you remember.

the page still has the tools an outliner has: / for an outline, a table, a chart, a block of code, and @ to reach a page, a pin or a trail. alt+↑ and alt+↓ move a block. an outline is one block among others here, not the shape of everything.

try before you move

the app runs in your browser with a few weeks of writing already in it: try it. also worth a look: an obsidian alternative and an open source journaling app.

what holds on every platform

shizumu is free, on linux, android, and windows. your writing stays on your device. sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted: the relay holds what it cannot read, and neither can we. the app and the relay are open source: apache-2.0 on the client, agpl-3.0-or-later on the relay.

it will not write for you, because the writing is the thinking.

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