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Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#21

Sharing knowledge is tough; I don't think there's a silver bullet and everyone wishes they could do it better. Some strategies we use: - Mailing Lists - a collection of mailing lists people can subscribe to if they're interested in a topic. Bonus points if you dedupe messages, as it's kind of annoying to get the same message more than once. We BCC to avoid Reply-to-All discussions/arguments. - Discussion board - disc…

Mailing lists is a trap. As your company grows it implements a data retention policy and poof, there goes all your knowledge when your old emails are auto-deleted.

Only use mailing lists for notification with links to the actual knowledge in a real document.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#25
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an org-mode editor besides Emacs that has a lower learning curve?

what makes you think Emacs has a high learning curve?

1. OP never mentioned VIM, so I do not see how it's relevant to compare EMACS to that - editor wars are long over ;) 2. OP asked for an alternative to EMACS for ORG-mode editing, as he obviously does not wants to use EMACS at the current time being.

Just saying that it's all so easy and making peoples issue with a complex editor like EMACS seem irrelevant or non-existing won't help anybody.

So, some alternatives to EMACS seem to be:

* for VS Code: https://github.com/vscode-org-mode/vscode-org-mode

* for vim: https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

* for atom: https://atom.io/packages/organized

* sublime: https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode

Also, some more information about integration can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode#Integration

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#26
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an org-mode editor besides Emacs that has a lower learning curve?

what makes you think Emacs has a high learning curve?

Why are you comparing Emacs to primarily modal editors? This discussion is not about those.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#27
post #7

Privately it's org-mode all the way. At work it's a mixture of mostly Confluence and Markdown README files.

We're the same.

Confluence's inline and bottom-of-the-page comments are excellent. You can have proper chained discussions.

Blog posts have been amazing for us to share small "experiences" like how somebody setup their environment (as opposed to more standard env setup documentation). These tend to be more informal.

Markdown files in repositories have been alright, definitely good for readmes. However, they suffer because our tooling (Gitlab) does not support comments on the files.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#28
post #9

Wikis built with org-mode is my magic bullet with everything under version control. The major problem was that everyone needed to know both git and Emacs to contribute but this is not the case since I made a proper web client https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

Is there an org-mode editor besides Emacs that has a lower learning curve?

Yes, my favorite is the one I built myself which look like this: https://demo.filestash.app/view/emacs.org?share=hn

It can create entire wikis by rendering documents in many formats: For example:

- HTML: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hn/text/html/emacs.org

- PDF: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hn/application/pdf/ema...

- markdown: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hn/text/markdown/emacs...

- txt: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hn/text/plain/emacs.or...

...

Also, the document shown here is coming from this github repo: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/nuage_org_demo and the app itself is free software: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#30
I second the needing a single, searchable source of truth. One of the main needs is for it to be maintained and updated. Having it all in one place helps with that and reduces the cognitive load of making the decision of where to update.

We use fossil; a bit minimalistic, but you get a wiki + code repository + tech notes + issue tracking all in one place and auto-updated with the code, and you can run it as a server with a web interface for those who don't need permissions to clone the repo.

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