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Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#41

Post by james_s_tayler »

vanoora wrote: post #30

You can check out Anki[1]. Apart from the initial setup, you won't have to worry about taking care of the web server. I create separate decks for different fields and then only if necessary do I create subdecks. I also tag all the cards that I create and make sure to spend a lot of time to ensure that it's made and tagged properly. So, whenever I learn something new and I believe at that point of time that it's worth…

This and Workflowy are my go-to for personal knowledge repositories. Anki is such a secret weapon. I'm finding Workflowy to be another.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#42

Post by bbischof »

vanoora wrote: post #30

You can check out Anki[1]. Apart from the initial setup, you won't have to worry about taking care of the web server. I create separate decks for different fields and then only if necessary do I create subdecks. I also tag all the cards that I create and make sure to spend a lot of time to ensure that it's made and tagged properly. So, whenever I learn something new and I believe at that point of time that it's worth…

I love anki, and I love this use of it, but how do you quickly make cards? Especially on mobile?

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#43

Post by dmortin »

ashton314 wrote: post #32

Deft in Emacs. [1] I write my notes in Markdown or Org-mode, and Deft lets me search them all really fast . For cross-file references, I use Org’s delightful file hyperlink scheme. For export, I use Pandoc. I’ve got a project that I haven’t quite figured out how to get on home brew (I’m new at this) that takes a file in and lets me read it like a Man page. [2] [1]: https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/ [2]: https://git…

I also use Org to store data and I use org-rifle to search it:

https://github.com/alphapapa/helm-org-rifle

I don't know if Deft recognizes org mode entries, but org-rifle provides entry-based search.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#44

Post by JesseAldridge »

breck wrote: post #39

Yes. I write things in Tree Notation using a simple file backed plain text database called Treebase. It allows me to easily jot information down using nearly any program and maintain a strongly typed, color highlighted, queryable database. I have a few different databases now, the biggest in the millions of rows. A workflow for one of the databases, an ontology of human medical measurements, is as follows: 1) I come…

What is Tree Notation? This is the first Google result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newick_format

Also, what do you do if you want to put the same node in two different places in the tree? (i.e. you want a graph)

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#45

Post by brad0 »

Notable is a great free markdown editor on GitHub. You can import regular markdown or Evernote files. All the files are stored in one directory and are grouped by tags. The tags can be hierarchical if you’re looking for that. Most of the time though the regular file search does great.

I find myself making so many small notes of how I did things at work or with AWS, zsh etc.

It’s a really powerful system while simple at the same time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#46

Post by danboarder »

Alex3917 wrote: post #12
danboarder wrote: post #7

For years I used the FreeMind mind-mapping app, but wanted to move all of it to a server that I could use across devices once smart phones came along, and moved to flat text files in Dropbox that I can edit with any text editor. The other thing with FreeMind is that the UX for navigating mind-maps can get unwieldy when they get big. (maybe there are other apps that implement this UX better, not sure). I have also tri…

> The other thing with FreeMind is that the UX for navigating mind-maps can get unwieldy when they get big. In what way? I have some pretty enormous ones and they seem fine so far. I'd like it if FreeMind were more actively maintained, but at least it still works basically fine on the latest version of Java.

I just remember expanding and collapsing things a lot to keep what I wanted in view. Clicking and scrolling -- perhaps I never got proficient in the keybindings so that could explain it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#47

Post by breck »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #44
breck wrote: post #39

Yes. I write things in Tree Notation using a simple file backed plain text database called Treebase. It allows me to easily jot information down using nearly any program and maintain a strongly typed, color highlighted, queryable database. I have a few different databases now, the biggest in the millions of rows. A workflow for one of the databases, an ontology of human medical measurements, is as follows: 1) I come…

What is Tree Notation? This is the first Google result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newick_format Also, what do you do if you want to put the same node in two different places in the tree? (i.e. you want a graph)

http://treenotation.org/

For graph nodes I use an id.

  organization Microsoft
   hq Redmond

  language C#
   corporateSponsor Microsoft

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#48

Post by peteforde »

You would have to pry https://workflowy.com from my cold, dead hands. It's the best outliner I've ever used and they actively resist adding features that would only please a subset of users. It offers excellent cross-device synchronization and works nearly as well on a phone as it does in a browser or desktop app context. You can attach notes and share at the node level, either via read-only link or collaboration invite which allows others to graft your shared hierarchy to theirs. It has well-considered keyboard shortcuts.

Most importantly, the search is intelligent and works instantly... even across my 100,000+ nodes.

My entire life is in Workflowy. I am thrilled to pay for my annual subscription, because the value I receive is outrageous.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#49

Post by Alex3917 »

danboarder wrote: post #46
Alex3917 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other thing with FreeMind is that the UX for navigating mind-maps can get unwieldy when they get big. In what way? I have some pretty enormous ones and they seem fine so far. I'd like it if FreeMind were more actively maintained, but at least it still works basically fine on the latest version of Java.

I just remember expanding and collapsing things a lot to keep what I wanted in view. Clicking and scrolling -- perhaps I never got proficient in the keybindings so that could explain it.

Spacebar expands and collapses nodes. I think part of the problem is just that the default settings are bad. Changing these couple things makes FreeMind 10x better:

Preferences -> appearance

  1. Check "edges start from 1 point at root node"
  2. Uncheck "enter confirms by default"
Preferences -> behavior

  1. Set "use formatting for all nodes" to no
Control-rightclick -> hide note window

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?

#50

Post by JesseAldridge »

I use the desktop version of Draw.io + some custom code to make the diagrams searchable: https://github.com/JesseAldridge/draw.io-convert

I do think a truly useful knowledge repository will fundamentally need to be a graph structure. This roughly reflects the neural connections in the human mind -- knowledge itself is a graph structure.

Draw.io is the best diagramming tool I've found, but it still kind of sucks in a lot of ways. I've started working on an alternative: https://github.com/JesseAldridge/consideration

The key features I'd like to add are multi-user collaboration and search across many diagrams.

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