361–370 of 373 posts
Obsidian is great. I'm a paying supporter (catalyst and sync). Weirdly I started playing with Emacs + org-mode recently (never been an Emacs user before!) and I'm seriously considering making it my exclusive "second brain". Something about org-mode, org-babel, org-jupyter, org-agenda and org-roam that just clicks with me.
So, I want to share an alternative: https://github.com/srid/neuron It's also just a bunch of markdown files And, uhhh.. I just found out this: > Neuron is being superceded by Emanote: https://github.com/srid/emanote Cool
One of the better advertisements for Neuron is the author's own notes being posted online as exported HTML.
Which knowledge management apps with backlinks are not Electron? I'd prefer non-Electron. Electron: VS Code (Foam, Dendron), Logseq, Obsidian, Joplin Not Electron: Emacs (Org-roam), Athens (?)
The comments here made it sound exciting, but it seems like it's proprietary, which is a no-go for me. I'll stick to plain text file notes and the occasional org-mode for now.
While Obsidian may be proprietary, as long as the files follow standard markdown syntax, it can be opened in any markdown editor. I am currently using both Obsidian & Typora on the same workspace folder(I like Typora better for editing since its WYSIWIG). Not being locked down to any specific software was the primary reason I moved away from OneNote.
I built a simple journal solution for myself two years ago. It sends an email every day and I can reply to it, and the response is stored in an SQLite database, in plain text. The db is on a remote server but copied to Dropbox every day (and in any case all the emails also exist in my sent folder). It is surprisingly effective at storing not just what I did with my day, but random thoughts and ideas, solutions to bug…
> It sends an email every day and I can reply to it, and the response is stored in an SQLite database, in plain text. Maybe this is obvious to other readers, but I love this portion of it. I think it's one of the critical details to making things like this work. It's easy to built a tool that you "just remember to use" but the issue then the tool is implicitly asking the user to modify their workflow, which isn't alw…
I often see people in this community being fans of note taking apps. Yet, I never really found why it's useful, maybe someone can enlighten me on that :D 1. For tech articles / knowledge databases -> tech seems to change so fast that research done 3-4 months ago is mostly useless (except for a few more high level areas) 2. For recording / knowledge database purposes -> i never seem to go back to them tho, googling (o…
Some thoughts and responses to what you've said:
1. I try to make sure anything I enter into my notes are intended to last, filtering/processing is a key step to that. This often means I won't enter notes unless they can contribute to my understanding of some lasting higher level concept. For example, I don't have any notes on tech library X, Y, Z. But I do have notes on concepts, like "Required accidental complexity should be avoided or separated" and if a library Z has a unique way of doing so, I may incorporate my understanding of the strategy to further my understanding of the concept.
2. My goal is less to simply collect links/articles, it's to process and assimilate. I write everything in my own words to clarify my understanding. I link it to other topics in my notes to help build stronger associations, which helps me ground and recall the knowledge. I'm also exploring whether I want to put some spaced repetition in with my notes to help keep pieces of information fresh.
3. I treat my notes as separate from my todo lists. The extra bit that these tools give you is the linking and clustering of information. I find the associations useful for encouraging identification/contextualization of where that knowledge sits in my current understanding and, periodically, discovering serendipitous connections.
4. I rarely revisit old books as well, but I also find that my recall of those books are terrible. Part of my note taking is to make sure that I have a better chance of understanding and taking away valuable information from those books. It's also worth mentioning that that I don't aim to have notes on the book, I aim to have new concept notes or updating existing concepts with new information.
So what domains do I find these apps useful? It's unclear to me how much I can attribute to the linking the app encourages. But, I do find myself recalling what I've noted much more frequently in my day to day as an software engineer. The identification and concretization of patterns/concepts has helped me be more articulate and have more clarity in my work, particularly when giving feedback to others.
All that said, everybody is different. This process might not work for you, or you may find you don't need it to get the same effects. I know plenty of successful people that don't. And if it doesn't work for you, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always fun to see these original comments in a HN thread. If you write this on Twitter you can get hundreds of retweets, hurry before someone else writes the tweet! Jokes aside, Obsidian being a Electron application is not a issue. The app starts in under 3 seconds for me, barely uses any RAM and CPU usage remains stable and low. If you want to actually contribute anything to this thread, feel free to give feedback o…
> The app starts in under 3 seconds for me For me that would be a showstopper. 3 seconds to open my notes app? I would have already lost my train of thought. :wq
While Roam has become something of a dumpster fire with its unprompted Reddit megaban, losing its whole dev team, etc, they do deserve partial credit for awakening the world to the possibility that there is much out there worth exploring beyond Evernote and Notion. There are now so many promising tools (most based on backlinking, as Roam popularized) that we have a site https://noteapps.info dedicated to chronicling…
>megaban I went to subreddit to check this and apparently it's a dozen trolls who like writing that founder is nazi. Ughm, ok.
So I think it's slightly more complicated than that, unfortunately.
(Note: I'm a moderator for Obsidian.md but I'm also in a couple of discords with Roam users, Logseq users, etc.)
[1] https://twitter.com/rroudt/status/1446542563620622351
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/q3q4uw/tyrann...