This might be a little off-topic. What do you all use for personal-knowledge-management, note-taking, etc? I'm not happy with my lazy Evernote setup. Just searching around, people mention: Notion, Dynalist, Spacemacs + Org-mode, Vimwiki, Zimwiki, TiddlyWiki, Standard Notes, etc, etc. Anyone wanna share their setup for these or others?

i use Notion, and i'm pretty hooked on it. it's replaced Evernote, Google Docs, and Wunderlist for me. it meets a lot of your criteria, but here are the ones it doesn't: - doesn't integrate with much (e.g Anki) - it's not fast in its current version (time-to-note is a solid several seconds) - no encryption - not sure about mobile clipping

I think about note-taking a lot and am daydreaming about implementing a better system—maybe we should have a channel for note nerds

this topic comes up every couple of weeks in this slack and I think a lot of people aren't 100% satisfied with their workflows. For me, most note taking apps add too much "overhead" and aren't flexible enough. I'm currently using a paper notebook and browser bookmarks in two categories (todo, done) to organize my thoughts / ideas. The notebook gives me a nice timeline of what I've done and browser bookmarks make it really easy to see whether you've read something before. That being said, I think it's a very personal thing and different people might prefer different approaches.

For notetaking, I use text files (markdown) + vim + git. I have daydreamed of building my own notetaking system, but somehow never get around to it. I did have this one idea to motivate the work. First, I build a generalized note editor: hierarchical structured text + images + diagrams. Then, I interpret the note data structure as a kind of S-expression, which becomes the syntax for a homoiconic visual programming language (aka "the LISP of visual programming languages", an idea mentioned in another thread).

I started to use zim wiki more than a year ago since I desperately needed to abstract over my local machines native file system. File systems projecting everything down to tree-topology make them utterly unsufficiently expressive for my working style. I publish some zim-notebooks via github which is nice because I say in control over my data. In particular: I'm save against vanishing cloud data. Zim doesn't box in your thinking by pre-made non-composable proprietary (toy)-tools. Scalability is questionable though. Farther out I'd dream about something akin to zim+git reimplemented in Unison/(Luna) and Holochain with FRP and cross application GUI level composability. ...

I'm very happy with Quiver. It's basically like Evernote was before they got desperate and terrible. The data is stored locally (sync with Dropbox or iCloud or whatever), and it's just JSON and markdown so if the client ever dies I'm not screwed. It does not do any anki/spaced rep, but it has most of the rest of your list. https://happenapps.com For iOS, I use Drafts because it's 100% the fastest way to start a new note on iPhone. It's how I "capture". I have the (beta) Drafts Mac client, and I use it to take the rough things I've captured on my phone and clean them up and flesh them out for archiving in Quiver. Works nicely.

I have tried many things over the years but always came back to Emacs + Org-Mode. It's the only system I can adapt to my ever-changing needs. It's also the only system I am aware of that has what I consider an essential feature: links to e-mails in notes and agenda entries. Mobile support was an issue with Emacs/OrgMode, but no longer is. Orgzly (Android) and beorg (iOS) provide good mobile-native access to Org-Mode files, and Emacs itself runs on both platforms if required, though it's definitely not convenient to use without a hardware keyboard.

Hi Doug, can you link the thread where you talk more about the homoiconic language?

Searching brings up https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1559280517023400. Not by fyr, just about lisp and VPL.

Hi @Al Mo. Here are some epigrams from @Ivan Reese, stripped of their context, that I mashed together to create my idea. I am not claiming that Ivan endorses my idea: "I'm advocating for a Lisp of visual languages*" https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1559963968153000?thread_ts=1559955992.151300 "Visual programming tools should be drawing tools first, and programming tools second." https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1561000774029300?thread_ts=1560992814.027900&cid=C5T9GPWFL

just a helpful reminder that this video from somewhere down that thread absolutely rules:

I keep thinking of Pane in conversations here but fail to bring it up because I can't remember the name.

Thank you all, sounds like a plan for this afternoon 🙂

yeah it's also hard to google because panes are a term in gui programming lol

Good to see TiddlyWiki on @Deklan Webster’s original list. It’s a remarkably powerful, extensible system and fairly well maintained (Jeremy Ruston, the creator, has been working on it for well over a decade, possibly two by now). That all said, I’ve still not found the time to properly dive in and get accustomed enough to use it as a continual note store. And coverage for mobile use is still somewhat lacking, from what I can tell. Any past or present TiddlyWiki users on here? I’m interested to hear what it’s like in practice.

I have used TiddlyWiki ten years ago for note-taking at my job. What I liked then was the ability to open it in the browser and to save it on disk. I guess it is no more an option and you now have to use some plugin/extension for persistence. As for the note taking experience I liked it for the easy formating and linking. If I remember well, I found that there were some usefull plugins/extension to help you format or organize your notes.

i'm not sure i know anyone who uses this, but this is another interesting one: https://workflowy.com/hi/

How do you feel about cross-linking notes (Wiki-like functionality)? Most note taking apps don’t seem to support it, yet many people seem to like the idea of a Wiki. Is that a feature you’re missing? Or is that something you work around in your current setup somehow (for instance like this: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/add-identity/)? Who here is familiar with Tiago Forte (https://praxis.fortelabs.co/category/types/free/) and his Building a Second Brain concept? Does that resonate at all?

Notion has really simple linking

@Stefan this is precisely what I called the Siren of Chandler! Reinventing programming is a plenty big problem all by itself. Beware scope creep! That said, I'd be up for a one-time virtual meetup 😄

@Alan Johnson Got it. Are you using links a lot in Notion? Anything about Notion that’s not ideal for your process?

No worries! (I consider growth to be a mixed blessing -- but not for this reason.) Chandler is, along with Xanadu, one of the two great failed software projects of our mythology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)

i’d be delighted if we could get that notetaking meeting together. another zettlekasten app ive thought about trying out is called sublimeless_zk —it ticks a ton of boxes: https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk

@Stefan i don't use a whole lot of links. at the top level my information base is pretty hierarchical in ways that dont really require a lot of cross linking. and at the lower levels, i use their database system a ton. their extremely intuitive design is their killer feature for user acquisition, and their database system is their killer feature for retention (both because of its utility and the fact that once you buy in, it would be tough to export your data in the same format). as far as what's not ideal, i've got a long list (https://www.notion.so/acjay/Notion-new-user-thoughts-759c7f6e544745b2883b95165d8da2b2). basically, it's still pretty young as a product and there are a lot of pieces they just haven't done yet

My most starred project on github is in this domain: https://github.com/JesseAldridge/toothbrush it's just a 100 line python script that searches and maintains a directory of text files

I use Zim and it's the next best thing to Notion -- I wish they used Markdown instead of RST, but otherwise it has replaced Evernote and ascii files.

Let’s talk about note taking: https://doodle.com/poll/43w26m9zk49hhart (I’d expect the call to be at least 60, if not 90 minutes. Seems like I can’t change the duration on an iPad…)

going to be on vacation in maine that week so i may have connectivity issues

I've spent the last fifteen years migrating my personal information system from one software project to another, a few I've used: VoodooPad (a personal favorite), Evernote, Yojimbo, DEVONThink, SimpleNote, Apple Notes, Bear Notes, Ulysses. And probably more I can't think of. One important point: I'd never use a web-based system that doesn't have an offline backup for this. I've read way too many horror stories of losing access to web software to do this, here's one: https://jaredsinclair.com/2019/04/07/jekyll-and-hyde.html What I use now is plain text files on the file system. There are a couple of classic bits of tech writing about this approach: 1. An Alex Payne blog post: https://al3x.net/posts/2009/01/31/against-everything-buckets.html 2. The chapter on plain text in the Pragmatic Programmer https://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer For my own notes, if they need to be shared, I put them in a GitHub repo (then I can share the file via the GitHub link, and people can comment, make pull requests to edit, etc...). Otherwise I use any standard sync solution, these days I use Dropbox for stuff I might want to access from computers I don't own, and the built-in iCloud Drive for everything else. I write notes in Markdown. To edit my notes I use a text editor. Which one isn't important, but the key feature the text editor needs is to be scriptable, in particular with a way to manipulate text and the file system. You need this in order to write your own features for your system. For the most part it's fast to implement your own features on top of plain text and the file system, but, and this is a big but, in order to do this you need to learn how to do two things: 1. Use a scripting language, one that can manipulate text and the file system, for me these are usually Bash and AppleScript, and 2. Extend text editors to add your own features. But once you can do those two things, actually adding features and extending your system is really fast. I'd say I average adding a couple of new features a month and they probably take about an hour each. The key advantage to this system is its flexibility, since you can write your own features, and you can leverage the decades of existing software that work with plain text and the file system. The number one feature I usually use is Wiki style links, so I can make a Markdown link like for example a todo

- [ ] Do [add a new feature](features/a-new-feature.md)

then I can follow that link to add more details in another text file. (For the text editor I usually use Vim these days, except for prose, which I hate writing in Vim, so I use iA Writer or BBEdit for prose. But I've implemented the major features of my system in Vim, Emacs, BBEdit, TextMate, like I said it's not hard once you've learned how to do it.)

@robenkleene Thanks for the write-up of your process; super interesting! Would you mind sharing a few more things you do frequently that you added to your workflow with custom scripts?

Definitely! Here's a few other features I like to do: - A lot of customizations are around search. I always want to be able to fuzzy find files by name, both relative to the current file, and relative to a root directory. The same for a recursive text search, relative to the current file, and relative to a root directory. - Also being able to start custom searches, e.g., two common searches I always do are looking up code snippets and looking up notes I've made about how to do things in particular software packages (e.g., how to crop something in Photoshop). So I always have quick ways to start those searches. - I always have a way to back up the currently selected text. This just saves it to an archive directory with a filename based on the todays date. I think a big reason things get disorganized is people don't have a way to delete stuff they aren't sure they want to get rid of yet, so this is my solution to that. - I always have a way convert the selection to title case for nice looking document titles https://daringfireball.net/2008/05/title_case - Working with URLs: E.g., if I'm researching a subject I'll make a list of the resources I want to take a closer look at, so I want to be able to select the list of URLs later and open them all in browser tabs. - This one is really code specific, but quoting a selection of a file for reference: E.g., generating a link like this from what I have selected in my text editor https://github.com/robenkleene/Dotfiles/blob/master/scripts/markdown_wiki_link.sh#L27-L30

@robenkleene Definitely agree on the window manager! Would you think the multitasking and multi-window changes coming in iOS 13 (iPadOS) fill the gap to macOS?

I doubt it will fill the gap completely, just because macOS has been around and refined for so much longer, with that said I’m be really excited to try it out!

Let's meet online and talk about our note taking process this Wednesday — find the exact time in your timezone in the Doodle here: https://doodle.com/poll/43w26m9zk49hhart Feel free to join us even if you didn't participate in the Doodle. I can send a Zoom link, however that'll make us disconnect and reconnect after 40 mins. If you prefer a different conferencing platform, please suggest it here. Speak to you Wednesday!

Is someone going to be taking notes on the note taking meeting for those of us who can't join?

I found the paper on running user studies for “idiosyncratic personal information management” interfaces. Ought to be interesting for anyone wanting to run field studies on PIMs because it’s a reflection paper on a few of their own studies. https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2008/infoscraps/wicked-tech-report-2008.pdf

Sorry I missed the chat. I had to deal with a broken water pipe instead 😖 Is round two already scheduled?

@alltom This is gold, right here: "..almost one fifth constituted data types that we observed infrequently across the entire study: for example, fantasy football lineups, words to spell-check, salary calculations, guitar chords, and frequent flier information."

Thanks everyone! Here's the video recording of our conversation: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0CybsQj0P4Ik-8nqEsqWjlq_w#zoom%5F0 To be continued…?

@alltom Very interesting paper, if only to show me how someone else may have blinkers that are brain-dead obvious to me, and how there are very likely similar blinkers on in my brain that are entirely self-inflicted. In their case, the crucial problem seems to be that they're trying to serve two masters. Either you're trying to iteratively refine a product for some initial customers or you're trying to get published in a prestigious journal. The former always requires lots of iteration, and is not in any way "science". You just have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Expecting to get a useable prototype after one iteration that you can take a break to send off to a journal seems quite naive. May as well pause to try to do "science" after the first day of the invasion at Normandy. Note-taking apps are idiosyncratic to each of us, but they're also strictly first world problems. Having to scribble on a piece of paper is really not that bad! So the authors have a very high bar to cross to get to something that convinces even a few people to adopt it even for a short time. It's not at all surprising that they didn't succeed on their first attempt. Best practices are necessary (useful?) here, but not sufficient. It is not a domain or problem so commoditized that you can run it on a formula. (And if you could, they wouldn't want to work in it.)

I just found out that Zoom, the tool we’ve used for a few virtual meetups so far, leaves your webcam remotely accessible if you use macOS, even if you “uninstall” Zoom afterward: https://medium.com/@jonathan.leitschuh/zoom-zero-day-4-million-webcams-maybe-an-rce-just-get-them-to-visit-your-website-ac75c83f4ef5

Late to this thread, but I actually wrote a great note taking app ("hierarchical spreadsheet"): http://strlen.com/treesheets/