Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

You could do a lot worse than read about the concept of a Zettelkasten or Commonplace book. Here's my notes on the two. I am currently using the app Bear to take notes on everything and anything, tagging as I go, and trying my best to link notes to other meaningful notes. Less formal than a Zettelkasten but more digital than your average commonplace book.

1. Commonplace Book This is a book of thoughts, findings and general collections of information captured throughout your life and brought together into one place. [How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book” | Thought Catalog](https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-...) [Commonplace Books Part 3: Choosing a System - GeekDad](https://geekdad.com/2020/03/commonplace-books-part-3-choosin...)

2. Zettelkasten

A different concept, but also with relevance to storing information for a lifetime. From my brief readings, there’s more emphasis placed on two stages of note. The first is a quick jot - an addition. The second is a more thought out, self-contained existence of the note. There’s also focus placed here on _linking_ notes together.

A good example of someone’s Zettelkasten is [[Andy Matuschak’s Note Collection]]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes?stackedNot...

[Zettelkasten - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten) [Bear App: A Solid Zettelkasten Solution for iOS Users — Mental Pivot](https://mentalpivot.com/bear-app-a-solid-zettelkasten-soluti...)

I had a friend who was obsessed with https://roamresearch.com/

Something about like... a syntax similar to Markdown that is [[deep-linkable]] or something that allows you to... create really deeply nested queries (almost like a GraphQL vibe) to finds things that are "loosely/tangentially related"

Something like... if you were to go to Wikipedia and play that game where you start on one page (a kind of bird) and try to get to a different page that is 50-60 deep/nested links away (a World War II event or something).

I personally am not a big note taker, but boy oh boy do some seem obsessed with special note-taking syntaxes/apps.

I also use vimwiki extensively. It's always at hand.

Joplin https://joplinapp.org/ Free, open-source, markdown, cloud sync, encryption, good mobile app

After trying out various ways, online and offline (including studying Luhmann's famous "Zettelkasten" http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/image/ZL1A1001/1/#topDo...), and the one that I stuck with is using plain text files.

One's knowledge is too valuable and important to entrust it to a particular binary format that can soon no longer be read. Plain text is durable, portable, easy to process using UNIX command line tools, it can be full-text indexed with a reasonable overhead. It can be version controlled easier than binary formats or formats with heavy markup.

I often summarize scientific articles, write down new ideas or need to preserve how I did something (run a system, install a tool) for later replay, and plain text is great for that for the most part. Occasionally, I used LaTeX commands e.g. for embedded $ maths $ or #hastags to tie together files by topic for indexing.

Importantly, my workflow is OS independent (I mostly use Linux and occasionally MacOS X/iOS) and editor agnostic (I use Sublime and Emacs).

I would very much like to hear from others how they address their KM needs.