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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?

#91

Post by iamnothere »

This is the most impressive example of the genre that I've seen: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/ (engine: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#oscean)

For me, I use Orgmode, plus a mess of PDFs in folders on Google Drive. I've been looking into both Polar and Emacs as potential replacements for document organization.

Right now I have a single folder that I save new things to, and I have a recurring task to go back and file documents regularly. It's not perfect but it works. I don't often reference my pile of PDFs, though; I might use it more with tagging options, which is why I'm looking at replacements.

I used to use Evernote. There were some things I didn't like about it, although it's been so long that I couldn't tell you what they were anymore. It might be a good system now.

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

#92

Post by AndrewKemendo »

encima wrote: post #89
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #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.

Memex by World Brain does this pretty well. Open source and stores all your browsing with great search. Can tag and highlight pages, as well as back up to cloud services

That's perfect thanks!

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

#93

Post by dmortin »

ashton314 wrote: post #64
dmortin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Org rifle also does word (substring) search in any order in the title+description if you type multiple words separated with spaces.

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

#94

Post by dmortin »

jackric wrote: post #77
dmortin wrote: 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

Above I only described the general concept which can be implemented with various tools.

I personally use Autohotkey on Windows for the global hotkeys which when pressed activate my running emacs for new note or search (I use orgmode in emacs for notes). And for searching I use the org-rifle package.

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

#95

Post by rmkrmk »

A bunch of markdown/text files in a git repo, hosted on github/gitlab/gitea (github in my case).

This way I can edit the files online on github.com, on my desktop and push/pull the changes. On my iOS device I use http://workingcopyapp.com - I can edit and create files as well as push and pull changes.

On my Desktop I can use any tool I want to search and edit the files, on github I have full text search and working copy also features full text search.

Most importantly: I own my data and they don't up in some database I need to worry about.

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

#96

Post by tmaly »

I have give a lot of thought to this. I bookmark a lot but its always hard to find information later on when you need it.

I came up with my own mental model “Make Knowledge Actionable”. With that, I find it is important to align knowledge you are saving with your goals. This means that someday I might need it knowledge should be kept in a different spot.

If I have some time, I have thought to build a system that lets me find information via mind map and different categories of abstraction.

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

#98

Post by jsilence »

tomjen3 wrote: post #90
jjav wrote: post #60

How long would you like to be able to access this content? If it is for the long haul, plain text is the only way to go (org-mode, etc). Any proprietary commercial solution will fade away in a handful of years. At best, you might be able to extract the content before they shut down but structure and metadata may be lost. Open source self-hosted solutions will last much longer but even in that case it might get to a p…

I am wondering what information from 1988 might still be of help for you now, but I would suggest that xml and json or similar would still last about as well as plain text, but would enable you to do more interesting things and store more useful documents (say a complete contact list).

A personal journal does have some intrinsic value. Org-mode is nice for journalling.

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

#99

Post by orpheline »

dngray wrote: post #80
orpheline wrote: post #35

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.

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll give it a look!

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

#100

Post by jsilence »

tmaly wrote: post #96

I have give a lot of thought to this. I bookmark a lot but its always hard to find information later on when you need it. I came up with my own mental model “Make Knowledge Actionable”. With that, I find it is important to align knowledge you are saving with your goals. This means that someday I might need it knowledge should be kept in a different spot. If I have some time, I have thought to build a system that lets…

I partly misuse Zotero as a bookmarker that does offline copies, indexing and gives me the possibility to categorize and tag.
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