I use a markdown editor, currently Typora, since it has a side pane with folder structure. I keep folders for personal notes, study notes, project plans, compsci “knowledge” where I have massive notes for each subject. All of it is backed up and synced between devices using Nextcloud. Works fine, is free and doesn’t need paid subscriptions.
I use Zim Wiki and have done for a few years now. Simple formatting, files in plain text, easy interlinking, decent search, and I've written some external scripts to work on the plain text files to be able to extract collated documents.
Backed up as part of my usual backup procedures, but only (easily) accessible with the GUI on my laptop. It would be trivial to sync it between devices and use it from multiple locations, but I don't need to.
I have been building and using an open source solution called Dnote [0] for the past two years. Maybe it could help you and others in search for a solution.
I used to write down information in note-taking apps but doing so didn't help me retain more knowledge. The reasons were: (a) no spaced repetition, because I never went back to my old notes once I wrote them. (b) environment switch due to having to launch external apps every time to write a note. Environment switch was especially painful when I was immersed in a complex coding problem.
I solved those two pain points by sending myself an automated digest of my notes every week (spaced repetition on autopilot) and building CLI, browser extensions, and IDE plug-ins to talk to my personal knowledge base so that I don't have to switch environment to put stuff in the knowledge base.
My experience is positive. It has helped me advance my foreign language skills, learn new vocabulary, and retain various technical micro-lessons that I come across during programming.
> I solved those two pain points by sending myself an automated digest of my notes every week (spaced repetition on autopilot) and building CLI, browser extensions, and IDE plug-ins to talk to my personal knowledge base so that I don't have to switch environment to put stuff in the knowledge base.
Oh, this is fantastic, thanks. I'm going to have to look into how I can do this for my own knowledge base. Especially the spaced repetition part.
I have used dnote locally for a short while and love it. Unfortunately I cannot connect to the "pro" server (company restrictions), so I am running my own dnote server for this. Works very nice except for a few minor bugs (which reminded me to get them reported on github).
Any plans to make the browser extention configurable so it can work with a self-hosted server?
Each technology gets its own folder. I add a new markdown file whenever I learn something new. Then I push to git and it is published live shortly after.
I organize all my life with Notion [0], there is a lot of template to start with if you don't have inspirations or ideas. Also you can share your pages as a website !
The way I did it was by treating the wiki as extension of my brain and having a perfect workflow for editing it at a speed of thought. In my case it's Sublime Text + Alfred + some macros.
The best thing about having a wiki is the 'in progress' nature of it. Soon I plan to extend my Alfred workflow to access any link inside any of the files in seconds too.
I like the way you've got yours set up. I think we have similar mindsets to reasoning about personal wikis. In case you are interested in hunting around, I've run across some personal wikis larger than yours, but not many. Even my own wiki-epeen is about three times the size of yours in ~11k files (wrapped into one) and ~470k lines.
Drafting what will eventually be static content from within the 'in progress' nature of the wiki is hard to beat. Including, this post, I draft many of my communications openly in the wiki, and that has been extremely useful. Lots of odd things come out of the practice.
Yes, thank you for telling me. I agree the wiki doesn't look good on every screen or suit most people. Sorry. It works well for me, and I'm the one who uses my personal knowledge base the most (by far).
Nice wiki you got going there.
Can you share the other personal wikis you came across? Well in case its fine with the author..
Im curious to see other approaches
For those of us without macs or ios - what would you recommend (if anything) for replacement of Alfred for Windows or Linux?
Or is there another kind of application you'd like to be able to use (that may or may not exist yet) in place of Alfred?
Would any search system work for that matter? Could a command line system be used (ie - some form of grep perhaps)? What about something like a "google appliance" style search system (a couple of these exist - both open source and otherwise)?
A more direct alternative to Alfred on linux is Albert [1]. There's also Rofi [2], Ulauncher[3], and probably many more launchers available.
On Windows Keypirinha[4] is pretty good. There's also Wox[5].
I don't think any of the alternatives are as well fleshed out as Alfred is but there are a lot of 'good enough' if you're using a different OS. Any launcher is better than the default search on windows 10, for example.
Do you continually update the organisation structure as you go? I've got something similar in Onenote and I always get stuck when I find that a piece of content can appear in multiple places
I didn’t even expect this appear on a the main page, after reading all comments yesterday. Ask this every week and then, and you will see different answers from different people.
I'm using Notion.so It's not a self-hosted platform and not personal in that sense but it has export to markdown capability so I feel safe storing my knowledgebase there knowing that I can download the data, files, images and everything else I have uploaded in a non-propriatry format
Here we go again. Hackernews users are not so stupid to fall for this marketing bullshit. Go back to reddit to shill your startup. You have been reposting the same thing in the last week, several times. It's annoying. It should be flagged.
This comment breaks several of the site guidelines quite badly. I appreciate your fine intention to protect the quality of HN—but the downside of being wrong (or even right) about a comment like this is orders of magnitude worse than the upside of being right. You simply can't attack a fellow user like this here. Comments need to remain respectful and assume good faith.
If you're worried about abuse, the thing to do is to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. That's in the guidelines too.
I am also using TiddlyWiki, but I just use it locally with almost all the defaults and no fancy formatting.
It's a little different than a traditional wiki in that each "page" (called a "tiddler") is not really designed as a "page" that you view, but rather a snippet, which can be of any length. You can link between them and whatnot as in any wiki.
The killer features for me are support for
* code syntax highlighting
* LaTeX math with KaTeX
* adding in media (pictures, screenshots, etc. beyond just plain text)
* creating dynamic/aggregate tiddlers based on tags. For example, the code to create a list of links to all my tiddlers tagged with both `blog` and `ideas` is:
This is what I've come to love about TiddlyWiki so much. I use it as my personal Zettelkasten for my finance studies, with each Tiddler being a single thought. For example, a recent Tiddler I created was simply:
"Banks have three alternatives for determining operational risk regulatory capital under Basel II
I make sure that each Tiddler has a link off to at least one other Tiddler. This one in particular has links off to my entries on the three particular approaches, which in turn link off to mathematical formulas and other related thoughts. I find by doing it this way I naturally tend to dive more and more in-depth to a particular topic until my Tiddlers are getting extremely specific but then one may link back to a very broad topic and the cycle repeats itself.
By doing this, when I read over my notes, I find it almost feels like I'm having a conversation with them. Just like a normal conversation that you and your partner are deeply interested in, you'll dive deeper and deeper into specifics until another random, broader thought pops up and you repeat the process. I'm continuously surprised about the thoughts I run into as I randomly walk through my notes.
But by far the most important thing for me is that this process has actually made note taking fun! I love it now. Every other system I've ever tried has felt like a chore. I enjoy it so much I'm usually adding several hundred new Tiddlers a day.
A year ago, I found a perfect solution for myself. I'm using https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki, writing there everything I find useful. From articles and quotes to lose ideas, notes, project information, or todos. It has support for markdown and export to HTML, which I can style however needed.
I made TreeBase. https://jtree.treenotation.org/treeBase/. Plain text files with strong typing and no syntax and uses Git for history. Been using it for years. Great for collaboration thanks to git. Have lots of new features in the pipeline.
Dokuwiki or MediaWiki self-hosted. Be sure to back it up with something like Tarsnap (remember: replication isn't a backup because errors are replicated too, and only an automatically-tested restore is a valid backup.)
This is an area that I'm keenly interested in. I desperately want to capture more information about my life both for posterity but also as a power-assist tool for my normal work/life.
I have noticed that many of the solutions here do not really translate well into cell phone use. Most of my life is not spent in front of my own computer. Even though I spend a lot of time at a work computer, it is heavily restricted (defense industry) and thus can't be used for personal projects. Anything I use has to work with my cellphone as a 1st class capture interface.
In my case, I recently decided that I since I am a heavy user of wikipedia, I should just use mediawiki. I'm used to it and it is well supported. The syntax isn't great but it has great API support. They have a decent cell phone interface, though I find that it isn't fast enough for taking notes. So I take quick notes in Evernote and move them into the wiki when I'm at my home PC.
It's working okay so far. I need to put more effort into my workflow. I want to have an automated infrastructure for capturing my various data from social networks, email, calendars, things like that.
Side note: I can't believe we are coasting into the year 2020 and copy/paste is still so friggin bad on my cell phone. Android has had copy/paste from text entry fields for a long time, but I still can't copy text out of most apps. WHY??? Case in point: YouTube descriptions and comments.
have you ever tried using an outliner such as Dynalist? im not familiar with mediawiki but i used Evernote for a long while. once I found out about dynslist i moved everything over in the space of a few days, even though it didn't have support for in-line images which I used a lot. the speed at which you can jot down notes made me not care about other missing features.
the other benefit of an outliner is that you don't have to worry about things getting unorganised. everything is a bullet point but you can also nest points under each other and then collapse the list or zoom in to focus on a certain point.
with a single page like in Evernote there is only so much you can write before things gets messy. if you want to reorder something it means you can to cut and paste whereas with dynalist you just drag and drop the bulletpoint
heres the full feature list
https://dynalist.io/features/full
or check out the showcase section in the forum to see what other people are using it for
I benefited immensely from taking the course. I have no personal benefit or stake in the program.
The author/program does use evernote primarily as the tool but the technique/process/workflow is independent of tool ( I think they do address notion and onenote as well if that's what works for you ).
1. I use Omni Notes (simple note-taking app) and Bear [1] to write down thoughts and longer texts. And a simple voice recording app [2] for bigger ideas that need more words.
2. After this, I evaluate them and add them to my personal wiki. I’m using BookStack [3] which is the best open-source wiki I’ve found. Every aspect of my life gets its own book with chapters and pages. It’s a pretty straight-forward structure.
I'm using this process for a year and it served me well (understanding life goals, writing down business ideas, structuring knowledge). Next step is bookmark management, I'll probably try out Shiori [4] (was once featured in a Show HN).
112 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadBacked up as part of my usual backup procedures, but only (easily) accessible with the GUI on my laptop. It would be trivial to sync it between devices and use it from multiple locations, but I don't need to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095849
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19294799
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847258
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108527
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21310030
I used to write down information in note-taking apps but doing so didn't help me retain more knowledge. The reasons were: (a) no spaced repetition, because I never went back to my old notes once I wrote them. (b) environment switch due to having to launch external apps every time to write a note. Environment switch was especially painful when I was immersed in a complex coding problem.
I solved those two pain points by sending myself an automated digest of my notes every week (spaced repetition on autopilot) and building CLI, browser extensions, and IDE plug-ins to talk to my personal knowledge base so that I don't have to switch environment to put stuff in the knowledge base.
My experience is positive. It has helped me advance my foreign language skills, learn new vocabulary, and retain various technical micro-lessons that I come across during programming.
[0] - https://github.com/dnote/dnote
Oh, this is fantastic, thanks. I'm going to have to look into how I can do this for my own knowledge base. Especially the spaced repetition part.
> https://www.getdnote.com/blog/how-i-built-personal-knowledge...
Btw, this is a great article.
Each technology gets its own folder. I add a new markdown file whenever I learn something new. Then I push to git and it is published live shortly after.
[0] - https://www.notion.so/
All files: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/blob/master/SUMM...
The way I did it was by treating the wiki as extension of my brain and having a perfect workflow for editing it at a speed of thought. In my case it's Sublime Text + Alfred + some macros.
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow
In fact I recently started to use my wiki to host article drafts I am writing.
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/fragments
The best thing about having a wiki is the 'in progress' nature of it. Soon I plan to extend my Alfred workflow to access any link inside any of the files in seconds too.
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind
I like the way you've got yours set up. I think we have similar mindsets to reasoning about personal wikis. In case you are interested in hunting around, I've run across some personal wikis larger than yours, but not many. Even my own wiki-epeen is about three times the size of yours in ~11k files (wrapped into one) and ~470k lines.
Drafting what will eventually be static content from within the 'in progress' nature of the wiki is hard to beat. Including, this post, I draft many of my communications openly in the wiki, and that has been extremely useful. Lots of odd things come out of the practice.
Or is there another kind of application you'd like to be able to use (that may or may not exist yet) in place of Alfred?
Would any search system work for that matter? Could a command line system be used (ie - some form of grep perhaps)? What about something like a "google appliance" style search system (a couple of these exist - both open source and otherwise)?
On Windows Keypirinha[4] is pretty good. There's also Wox[5].
I don't think any of the alternatives are as well fleshed out as Alfred is but there are a lot of 'good enough' if you're using a different OS. Any launcher is better than the default search on windows 10, for example.
[1] https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert [2] https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi [3] https://ulauncher.io
[4] http://keypirinha.com [5] http://www.wox.one
currently building a service that can index and query across text based knowledge bases. you can find demo here: http://demo.alphacortex.io
would love to hear your thoughts and talk further about organizing knowledge :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21310030
If you're worried about abuse, the thing to do is to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. That's in the guidelines too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
About 3 years, and I use it every day. The experiences with the tool are documented in the tool.
It's a little different than a traditional wiki in that each "page" (called a "tiddler") is not really designed as a "page" that you view, but rather a snippet, which can be of any length. You can link between them and whatnot as in any wiki.
The killer features for me are support for
* code syntax highlighting
* LaTeX math with KaTeX
* adding in media (pictures, screenshots, etc. beyond just plain text)
* creating dynamic/aggregate tiddlers based on tags. For example, the code to create a list of links to all my tiddlers tagged with both `blog` and `ideas` is:
`<<list-links "[tag[blog]tag[ideas]]">>`
* It works in any standard browser.
* You own your data, and it's very hackable.
* Its learning curve is better than comparable tools (e.g. emacs).
* It lowers the friction between you and your machine, enabling you to upload a semblance of your mind into the machine with minimal effort.
* Search and organization are mind-bendingly powerful.
* It is amazing at allowing you to reuse and reconstruct your work. It's designed to evolve.
"Banks have three alternatives for determining operational risk regulatory capital under Basel II
1 - Basic Indicator Approach 2 - Standardised Approach 3 - Advanced Measurement Approach (AMA)"
I make sure that each Tiddler has a link off to at least one other Tiddler. This one in particular has links off to my entries on the three particular approaches, which in turn link off to mathematical formulas and other related thoughts. I find by doing it this way I naturally tend to dive more and more in-depth to a particular topic until my Tiddlers are getting extremely specific but then one may link back to a very broad topic and the cycle repeats itself.
By doing this, when I read over my notes, I find it almost feels like I'm having a conversation with them. Just like a normal conversation that you and your partner are deeply interested in, you'll dive deeper and deeper into specifics until another random, broader thought pops up and you repeat the process. I'm continuously surprised about the thoughts I run into as I randomly walk through my notes.
But by far the most important thing for me is that this process has actually made note taking fun! I love it now. Every other system I've ever tried has felt like a chore. I enjoy it so much I'm usually adding several hundred new Tiddlers a day.
Reading books and taking notes.
Watching videos and taking notes.
Attending meetups and taking notes.
Doing. Specifically, by applying what I learned to small projects.
I collect all the notes and projects in GitHub. It's simple (markdown), searchable, versioned and all in one place.
Oh, and free, portable and highly available while hosted by someone else.
www.notion.so
I have noticed that many of the solutions here do not really translate well into cell phone use. Most of my life is not spent in front of my own computer. Even though I spend a lot of time at a work computer, it is heavily restricted (defense industry) and thus can't be used for personal projects. Anything I use has to work with my cellphone as a 1st class capture interface.
In my case, I recently decided that I since I am a heavy user of wikipedia, I should just use mediawiki. I'm used to it and it is well supported. The syntax isn't great but it has great API support. They have a decent cell phone interface, though I find that it isn't fast enough for taking notes. So I take quick notes in Evernote and move them into the wiki when I'm at my home PC.
It's working okay so far. I need to put more effort into my workflow. I want to have an automated infrastructure for capturing my various data from social networks, email, calendars, things like that.
Side note: I can't believe we are coasting into the year 2020 and copy/paste is still so friggin bad on my cell phone. Android has had copy/paste from text entry fields for a long time, but I still can't copy text out of most apps. WHY??? Case in point: YouTube descriptions and comments.
the other benefit of an outliner is that you don't have to worry about things getting unorganised. everything is a bullet point but you can also nest points under each other and then collapse the list or zoom in to focus on a certain point.
with a single page like in Evernote there is only so much you can write before things gets messy. if you want to reorder something it means you can to cut and paste whereas with dynalist you just drag and drop the bulletpoint
heres the full feature list https://dynalist.io/features/full or check out the showcase section in the forum to see what other people are using it for
I benefited immensely from taking the course. I have no personal benefit or stake in the program.
The author/program does use evernote primarily as the tool but the technique/process/workflow is independent of tool ( I think they do address notion and onenote as well if that's what works for you ).
A brief high-level summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjZSy8s2VEE
1. I use Omni Notes (simple note-taking app) and Bear [1] to write down thoughts and longer texts. And a simple voice recording app [2] for bigger ideas that need more words.
2. After this, I evaluate them and add them to my personal wiki. I’m using BookStack [3] which is the best open-source wiki I’ve found. Every aspect of my life gets its own book with chapters and pages. It’s a pretty straight-forward structure.
I'm using this process for a year and it served me well (understanding life goals, writing down business ideas, structuring knowledge). Next step is bookmark management, I'll probably try out Shiori [4] (was once featured in a Show HN).
[1]: https://bear.app
[2]: https://github.com/dkim0419/SoundRecorder
[3]: https://www.bookstackapp.com
[4]: https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori