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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?

#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://github.com/ashton314/homebrew-mm

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

#34
Lately I've just been using a directory full of markdown files. I store my personal collection in Dropbox but it would be just as easy to use git or any other tool. I've created an alias to automatically open that directory in my favorite editing tool when I type "notes".

I also manually maintain an index.md file to categorize things, but it's not really necessary when you can just use grep or your editors search feature to find what you need.

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

#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 capture ad hoc notes, ideas, and suggestions without opening vim. They go into a YAML file right now; tooling in process to pull them directly into the wiki, so everything's in one place.

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

#37
I have a public one: til.secretgeek.net where I’ve posted hundreds of little technical things I’ve learned. Uses gitbooks.

Plus a public wiki where I posted things I’m interested in: wiki.secretgeek.net

Also have private places where I store things I learn that are business confidential etc. As well as a password manager for the most protected things.

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

#38

Lately I've just been using a directory full of markdown files. I store my personal collection in Dropbox but it would be just as easy to use git or any other tool. I've created an alias to automatically open that directory in my favorite editing tool when I type "notes". I also manually maintain an index.md file to categorize things, but it's not really necessary when you can just use grep or your editors search fea…

I do the exact same, down to the "notes" alias. I find the downside to this approach is it doesn't work well on mobile - the Dropbox app can edit files but there's no search and it all feels a bit clunky.

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

#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 across a new term, 2) (if afk I first email it to myself) I simply do a “touch term.hipo” at the shell, or use vim, sublime, or another handy tool. Then I add data in a strongly typed but 0-syntax tree language I created called “hipo”. If I’m in sublime or another editor I get live autocomplete and syntax highlighting 3) I use git to version everything 4) I have a simple DB server which reads the files and allows me to analyze using any tool, from R studio to Vega, etc.

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

#40
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 click a maximize button to get a usable view of the editor and the editor UI still takes up a lot of space. It is web based, but it is very lightweight and I have found it very easy to host.

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