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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?

#73

I use BookStack ( https://www.bookstackapp.com ). MIT licensed & easy to self host. It's fast and has good search, a good editor, and uses simple hierarchical organization + tagging. I like that it gets out of my way and does a good job of handling everything from code snippets to freeform thoughts to recipes. BookStack is best for things that 'look like' documents. Mobile editing could also be better - you have to c…

BookStack developer here. Thank you for sharing the project. If you have not yet updated to v0.26 it might be worth doing so as, upon many other UI changes, I focused on trying to improve the mobile UX [1]. Still some issues in iOS to resolve though.

[1] https://www.bookstackapp.com/blog/beta-release-v0-26-0/#mobi...

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

#74
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?

I use the AnkiDroid app on my phone. And it's a pain to quickly make cards on the phone. You will get better and faster at creating cloze deletions after creating a few cards on a phone. That's why I only use AnkiDroid on phone to revise (and seldom create cards) if accessing a laptop is a bigger pain.

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

#75
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.

Yes. It's the ultimate secret weapon! Anki was a game changer for me.

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

#77
post #62

The 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 ty…

Would you please explain the components of this setup? Hotkey tool, window manager, search tool etc? Thanks

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

#78

I use NVAlt with a quite complex tagging method. All in all, I guess you could say that it is a Zettelkasten notebook. [1] [1] https://zettelkasten.de/

If anyone is interested in developing zettelkasten app based on keyboard shortcuts + vim hit me up at artur (at) qnsi.io

I want to open source it in the future. It is electron app soon to be written in typescript

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

#79
I've been looking for something similar to a browser history, but it actually snapshots the text/images for each page so that I can search it. Ideally it would be OSS, self-hosted and cross platform so that it can feed a repo from desktop web and phone.

Seems like something as simple as a firefox add-in would be useful.

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

#80

I'm usually in a terminal, so I use vimwiki ( https://vimwiki.github.io/ ) - it supports markdown, adding pages is trivial, and vim tags or CLI tools like grep makes it easily searchable. It lives in a private NextCloud instance, so everything's available from my laptop or phone (although editing markdown on a phone is no fun). Edit - this is great for detailed note-taking; I also use a custom command-line tool to ca…

> It lives in a private NextCloud instance, so everything's available from my laptop or phone (although editing markdown on a phone is no fun).

Have you tried Markor? https://github.com/gsantner/markor#screenshots I have found that it's a pretty good Markdown editor for Android. It's available in F-Droid too.

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