I use Notion.so and my second brain. I used to store all this info in markdown files spread across many folders. The most important tool that Notion has for me is a quick search over all this data.
Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
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Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
#62The most important for me is quick storage and retrieval, so everything must be keyboard based. To make a note, I press a global hotkey, an editor window pops up, I write the note then close the editor with a hotkey.
It makes it very seamless to make new notes.
And for retrieval I press another global hotkey, a prompt pops up, I start typing and it immediately lists my matching notes (the search query can find the typed words in any order of course), I select from the list with enter and the note is displayed, and can be edited too if needed.
So finding something takes usually at most 5 seconds (pressing the hotkey, typing, selecting). A mouse-based system could not beat this efficency.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
#63I saw somewhere that Woody Allen keeps a bin full of pieces of paper that have 1-2 sentences of a possible plot of a movie, just throws another one in when there's an idea.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
#64Deft 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.
Wow. Rifle looks neat. Thanks for mentioning that!
Deft will scan any plain-text file, according to the set of file endings you give it, and it will put your cursor at the point in the buffer where one of the search words occurs, but it won’t automatically extract the ending, AFAIK.
I should mention that deft does fuzzy matching, or at least words don’t have to be contiguous.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
#65I do. Primarely using Trello and Gitbook for my Encyclopædia Universalis
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
#66Orgmode.
I have been using personal knowledge repositories for more than 20 years now, and if there is one lesson I have learned: never, never ever use any proprietary, platform specific - or worse, web-based - solution, no matter how good it is. Plain text is the only way to go.
My favorite tools in the past were Tinderbox from Eastgate and Curio from Zengobi, but both were Mac only and I had to leave them behind when I switched to Linux a couple of years ago. I collected some experience with Scrivener and used PMWiki a while, but the first is not really supported on Linux and the second wasn't somehow responsive enough for my needs. ZIM wiki on Linux is actually quite nice, but when I discovered orgmode it hit just right and I never looked back for other tools.
My org-file organisation: I have one super-big master org-file in which I collect just about everything regarding software development, technology in general, life lessons and stuff. For customer projects I generally create a dedicated file in which I not only collect knowledge regarding that project, but also do the project management with tasks, documentation and stuff. If one of the topics in the master org-file grows really big (this is for example the case, when I start to use a new programming language full scale for productive purposes) I will migrate that node to its own file. I also keep most of my bookmarks as links in org-files in a proper context, and I like to use links to files in the local filesystem (like PDF-manuals) within my org-files, although this requires some discipline in the organisation of the local folder hierarchy.
The only other tool that I started to use besides org-mode, just a couple of weeks ago is Anki, for stuff that I want to learn by heart.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
#67You 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 inv…
Workflowy looks quite interesting. Could it be used to store in-depth knowledge? My quick play with it on their site looks like it's more of an outline tool, but how would it go with say storing the information that you might find on a Wikipedia page?
Shift enter to add descriptions which you paste long form text in.
The issue I’ve always had is not being able to paste images into it
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
#68I have a wiki I keep on GitHub rendered with GitBook.
Here is my workflow of editing and publishing it:
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal knowledge repository?
#69I went through many software solutions and ended up with Org Mode as well. There may be some clunkiness at the beginning and it definitely lacks the glamour of proprietary solutions such as Notion. But once you get a grip on Org Mode, you will be amazed how deep the rabbit hole goes. ;)
There is a great Org Mode tutorial [1] on YouTube by Rainer König.
The only « problem » is that you need to learn Emacs. I recommend Emacs Doom [3]
Also, I'm experimenting with making my Org Mode notes public. Here's a humble beginning [2]. I only publish them once they are cleaned, so it's just a tiny bit for now.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVtKhBrRV_ZkPnBtt_TD1... [2]: https://zaiste.net/programming/ [3]: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/