Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#21

Post by lolive » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

Obsidian was the mind opener for me. Simple to use. Backuped on Dropbox on my various machines, it is my ubiquitous personal knowledge base. The fact that you can copy/paste HTML from web pages into it makes me rebuild knowledge I get from the internet into my own version. Really really a fundamental tool for me. The Vi of knowledge.

PS: I don't know the other tools (notion, roam,...) PPS: a big downside in Obsidian, in my humble opinion, is publishing that knowledge on the web. Probably a static CMS on top of the .md file generated with Obsidian can do the trick. But it is a tedious step that I never had/wanted to investigate.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#22

Post by qcardona » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

I used to use Evernote for bookmarking and note taking but honestly, lately it’s getting clunky and I’m switching to Google Keep.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#23

Post by herdrick » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

Everything starts in my emacs scratch buffer (the default file opened upon startup), which is an org-mode file, and when some category of stuff gets big I move it into its own file in Dropbox. The content is just links and written-out thoughts and questions.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#24

Post by andthat » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

After what I suppose has been 15 years of searching, I have settled on the Zettelkasten method using Doom Emacs (Vim-like keybindings) with org-mode and org-roam (https://www.orgroam.com). I struggle to think of anything that could beat it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#25

Post by gman83 » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

I use Google Docs. I actually use it in combination with this tool: https://spaceli.io/

Then I use this Custom New Tab URL extension to turn my new tab page to Spaceli: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/custom-new-tab-url...

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#26

Post by drenvuk » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

I used to use trillium notes (which is really good) for GTD and idea mapping for a few months but stopped. I just use a big three ring binder with some five star hard to rip paper now with some plastic sticky tabs for categories and write down things that are important. The barrier to taking down and recalling info is both low and high enough in just the right way that I remember things I want to remember and can recall important enough forgotten things by referring to my notebook. I just reference other ideas by category and some other detailing info and flip through until I find what i'm looking for.

Digital notes are good for a lot of people and a lot of situations but not for my long term very general knowledge based tasks. For specific commands/documentation/syntax/techniques yeah digital notes are nice. For Brain storming, and connecting ideas though? I fully believe paper works best. It's more flexible.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#27

Post by sharikone » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

It's Joplin for me and a LibreOffice spreadsheet for tabular knowledge.

Joplin is opensource and uses Markdown files. Syncs with WebDAV. It's the best I found till now.

LibreOffice is for tables since Markdown sucks for them

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#28

Post by dmje » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

GDrive, Synology, Trello but at the heart of it all, Dokuwiki. Man, that thing rocks, all MD, all exportable into whatever format I want, my own theme, backend backup however I want, links, media, nesting, tags. It’s ace, and doesn’t get nearly enough air time IMO

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#29

Post by herbertl » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

Physical 4x6 index cards (organized with the zettelkasten method—https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/) and corresponding digital version in Notion

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#30

Post by timmit » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

Joplin notebook for personal knowledge

Tiddlywiki for a public knowledge base