- All content stored as flat files on your hard drive.
- Organised by correctly named folders.
- Can embed images. Will link or autocopy them to the appropriate folders.
- Is great if you like markdown.
- Dark theme.
Honorable mentions:
- Infinite tab indentation synced in google docs, in google drive, since I already pay for google anyway.
- todo.txt
I'm with you here. I've recently discovered Obsidian, and have been really enjoying using it. It's probably been the tool that most matched my mental model (for me that was "personal wiki") of note taking and thought processing before I started that has also been easy enough to stick with.
I feel like it should be easy to make Obsidian the content editor for a static site generator like Hugo, but I haven't found a tool for that yet. (Maybe it's so obvious that one isn't needed, but I'm not a dev, just a normie)
I did this recently to start creating a public (but unlisted) developer log, à la Carmack .plan.
Obsidian has a community GitHub backup plugin, but you can also just manually push to a repo whenever you want to update the site. Then you can use that repo as a proto-CMS, and pull it in with, say, NextJS to create a static site. Anything with built in CI (Vercel, Netlify, GH Actions) should be able to detect the change to the CMS repo and rebuild your static site. Both steps are quite easy (took me under 10 minutes total).
That said, if you don’t need special control over your content/presentation, then you could alternatively just pay Obsidian $8 a month for their Publish feature.
I forgot to add that logseq is open source, the file encryption feature is built-in (you can opt-in or opt-out) and all the documents are saved locally in md files.
Obsidian don't have encryption built-in, they do have the encryption via community plugin. But it is only partial (I believe per note), not the entire vault.
Started using Obsidian last week. It's so easy and works how ever you want it to. Roam Research is nice, but it's geared toward a specific way of writing.
Also, the Syncing across devices they provide for $4/m right now is a steal and very effortless.
Of course you can take backups using Git, very easy.
I had used Obsidian - when it was all local file - for a while and switched to Roam because I could use it across my devices; going to try out Obsidian again because of the Syncing that's now available (and I was too lazy to get it set up with some stupid/janky rsync attempt on a box/drive folder).
Definitely liked Obsidian's ecosystem a lot more than Roam's so I'm excited to give it another shot now that my one missing - but needed - feature is now available.
Lots of good tools out there, but Obsidian is the one I've settled on, for better or worse. I use the $48/year sync service. It does a perfect job syncing my files on my Linux desktop and laptop, my Chromebook, and my phone. Turns out Linux ARM (for my Chromebook) isn't as well supported by various apps as I expected, but their build is available and works perfectly.
Assuming you’re talking about notion: collaboration+sharing is what brings the real value to these tools. Enterprise is where the money is and they’re not going to pay for a wiki+project management tool without those two features.
Zim is great too. In terms of functionality, it does a lot of the things Obsidian does, but it uses its own wiki syntax and it's not pretty by any means. Obsidian has been much more effective at building community and growing the ecosystem of plugins.
Edit: And one pretty annoying thing - it's built on old-school technology that doesn't even support setting the editor width. That's quite a problem in the era of widescreen monitors.
I used to work with the Zettelkasten Archive and vim, but I think I'll switch to Obsidian. The graph and link autocompletion are the main selling points for me compared to my current setup.
I maintain a small open-source script[^1] to find clusters and orphaned notes in a Zettelkasten, and I find it's a good addition to groom my notes from the terminal.
I'll echo others here; Obsidian is an amazing tool. For those who are curious about Obsidian, I recently created a YouTube video series for my graduate students titled "Tools for the Life of the Mind." [0] It covers some philosophical points about flow and focus, then dives into reading and note-taking and then covers a few tools like Evernote, Scrivener, Zotero, and Obsidian. Video 13 covers a workflow for migrating Zotero highlights and notes into Obsidian, which I found buried in the Obsidian forums. Completing this missing link has been a game-changer for my research workflow.
Login to recommend Obsidian, too.
After several months of usage, I even created a regex plugin to enable me to build knowledge database even faster :
https://github.com/No3371/obsidian-regex-pipeline
For the last little while, I converged on a local optimum in note taking: writing Markdown files with VS Code. VS Code (with the Markdown Preview plugin) lets me type math equations in LaTeX and draw block diagrams using Mermaid notation.
Turns out Obsidian supports Mermaid and LaTeX in Markdown too. And it runs on desktop and mobile devices. And has an elegant folder-based interface.
I’ve struggled with other second brain tools, but Markdown files with LaTeX and Mermaid support somehow just fit the way I think and work —- that is, I like writing lots of prose but still have the occasional need to draw diagrams and to write math, and have the doc transform into something that is aesthetically pleasing.
Try readwise with the plugin.
You can annotate using Hypothesi.is on the desktop. Command Browser on iPad has direct sync with Readwise.
Then import your notes in Obsidian. I am not sure about the mobile
I've been using TheBrain for about 5 years & am mostly happy with it. It is a bit pricey though! The unique visual is an almost most for me. I'm willing to try Obsidian, but I think I'd need TheBrain's unique visual to make it work for me.
How does one stick to any of these systems? I've tried BATF, org-mode, OneNote, and pen/paper. Each of which fail spectacularly due to overload and eventually they just end up being forgotten about long enough to no longer be useful.
What do you mean by "overload?" If that's why these tools always fail for you perhaps looking at that may give you insight on the root cause.
I think the key for most of these, particularly BATF/BASS is the "always open" part. I've recently started playing around with Obsidian mentioned elsewhere and if you don't have it open at startup it's easy to forget about it. And you need to be pretty diligent at the beginning of adding interesting/educational things to your documents while you're still trying to form the habit.
Having a decent organization system is pretty important too (one of the main failings of BATF/BASS in my experience). If I need to scroll through a bunch of development and business stuff to find that interesting physics article that is suddenly relevant again I'm much less likely to do it than if I have a "physics" document or folder I can see and get to easily.
Overload is, it becomes disorganized after adding on too many things. BATF for example, eventually one big text file gets filled with no longer relavent things, and it becomes hard to navigate to find whats important.
For me, my notes app is a program I use far more than any other, except for a web browser, so your question doesn't really make sense. It's like asking "how do you stick with Word or Excel"?
I use the common folder-of-text-files method (currently with Ulysses, although I've used other apps in the past). Any time I need to write something down, that's where I go first, unless I'm drafting a document that needs to be sent to someone else.
Here is when it gets used most:
- Researching something online
- Preparing for a call or meeting
- Taking notes on a call or meeting
- Random ideas I want to save
- Important information I want to keep (but not so secret that it needs to go in a password manager)
I agree with chapium, and my thanks to him for penning down his observations into words. I would add that there comes a point when these systems and their maintenance overwhelm my limited abilities (I know because I have tried org-mode, and OneNote). I often keep defaulting to pen/paper, but carrying around sheafs (now boxes) of papers is no fun.
And I agree with pc86's thoughts on 'decent organization system' and "always open". I am working on getting better at it with pen/paper.
I can empathize with you and the OP. The only one I've got to stick is literally just a text file that I always have open in VIM. I have a keybinding to open up the terminal window so it's always right there.
I have a couple of macros set up to put in the current date, and a different color for bullet points that are "done" or not completed yet
This is the only one that works for me, and I've tried Org-mode, evernote, onenote, joplin, notion, etc. It's a combination of no-friction to open (I literally just press alt+~) and opinionless. If I want to paste something in there, I don't have to fiddle with a UI to get it how I want, because the formatting doesn't matter at all.
Note that each puts on a constraint, but I want the notes to sync.
When I am driving perhaps I need to speak into something that takes the notes without having to be turned on, hit the I am not driving button, find the app and launch it.
When I am walking, I need to take a note on my mobile and it cannot be a large graphical mind map.
In front of my computer -- this is where 99% of note taking apps shine and what they are made for.
In a meeting, especially in person or zoom, it is almost rude to type. It is perfectly acceptable, and almost polite, to write out notes by hand in a pad (it shows I care and am paying attention). I need to transcribe those notes later on.
The idea note taking system performs and syncs across these contexts well.
the only app that does this well for me is Todoist, but that's for tracking todos. Works via desktop app (+ global hotkey to add a todo at any time), browser (+ extension for saving webpages), mobile app, and siri (when I'm in the car). Without all those things no app has stuck for me. Todoist works decently well for short memo-type notes (you can add comments and attach files to todos), but I'm also looking for another companion app to use for more longform / wide reaching information.
And for many "big-a* text files" I'd recommend org-mode. It also has its own markup (much more powerful than markdown), and can also do spreadsheets (which I personally use only marginally).
Manage this in git and you are independent of any service, yet with extensive-- perhaps even uncontested --feature-coverage.
Both are infinitely nested tree editors, that enable you to organize information very conveniently. Great for writing, brainstorming, taking notes.
On iOS I use Editorial (a great text editor) to write down all my notes, and I use #tags to make it easy to search all my notes by topic (like #webdev, #health, #books, and so on).
Also Track and Share is a great habit tracker, and Things 3 is a great todo list manager. The more thoughts I can offload from my brain into the app - the better.
On my laptop I use Emacs org-mode, it's fantastic.
Does anyone get anything out of mind-map visualizations? Everybody loves to show a screencap of their latest diagram, with all the circles and colorful connector lines, but do they ever actually help anyone realize anything?
In my experience, this sort of visualization is good for mapping out an actual complex, sequential/staged process (and for that, one would instead use actual dedicated diagram maker apps). But other than that, it seems to be mostly for note-taking app makers to show off to show how cool their app is.
There's this scene in Finding Forrester where Sean Connery marks up a manuscript with the phrase "constipated thinking." Mind mapping for me is a way to grease the skids, as it were, since the hardest part in organizing thoughts is just getting them down. While I prefer pen and paper--the tactile sense of it helps me--the mind map is a useful tool for taking what is essentially a disorganized mass of thoughts and figuring out how to organize it.
> do they ever actually help anyone realize anything?
Mind maps help me realize things. I use a conference room whiteboard rather than an app.
Starting with asking a question as the root node like "Goals?" and then putting goals around that, and then from those goals, things I'd need to do to accomplish them. "Obligations?" and writing out various people/places/things I have obligations to, and then next what it means to fulfill those obligations.
Being able to look at it all on the whiteboard and pace around a bit seems to be very useful for me. This type of thing helps me sort things out and frequently I have realizations during it that make things more clear.
I mostly do project planning in outlines, but sometimes I will break out the whiteboard. Sometimes those are mind maps and will make me see missing pieces; frequently, I suppose they're diagrams and may not count.
Have you ever tried doing this with a plain text Markdown file with hierarchy (headers/subheaders)? or an outlining tool (emacs org-mode etc)? or a spreadsheet? What do you see as the advantages of the mind-map method?
I've used all of those to organize ideas for different things. Markdown files with hierarchy for planning blog articles, talks. An outlining tool (OmniOutliner or vim with * and indentations) for project planning from building things to cleaning my office. Spreadsheets for figuring out how I'm managing time and using the cells to represent time I'm awake in the week.
I think the advantage of the mind map is using it as a tool to explore things I'm not entirely sure about and get more depth on them. Like in my examples, I choose Goals and Obligations as things I had used mind mapping for exploring. Once I have some of them written on the whiteboard, more like items start to come to mind that might not otherwise. I might also be conflating the value of any of the elements of this -- pacing in front of the whiteboard, it being a more physical representation by being big and hand-drawn, that it starts to look a bit like a puzzle. Then it starts to present all of these questions. Like after mapping out what my obligations were, it made sense to ask, "well, why?", and then tie those to core reasons, which started to get into agreements, which then made me think about agreements. Why do we form agreements? In a way, I suppose it's giving me space to go on a somewhat controlled and documented deep dive into my thoughts.
They’ve helped me in the past realise project/idea scope - breaking it down. Although I often do that breaking down with heirarchical lists… mind maps aren’t a game changer for me.
I'm using Vimwiki for now. I seem to be happiest with notes in vim, but (since I use it in a terminal) I'd still like a way for that particular vim (in terminal) window to stand out. Any ideas? Maybe using an alternative terminal emulator for that one?
For a while I used vimwiki in a drop-down term: guake and yakuake have this as a primary feature, good for gnome/KDE, but if you're using a tiling WM you can use termdrop on most terminal emulators.
I like this. Would love to see the details of how you do it. I too dislike adding dates to entries. My solution has been a vimscript snippet that inserts the current date. I have bound it to <C-l><C-d>
fun! InsertDate()
let l:line = getline('.')
let l:date = strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
call setline('.',strpart(l:line,0,col('.')).l:date.strpart(l:line,col('.')))
endfun
inoremap <C-l><C-d> <ESC>:call InsertDate()<CR>
Joplin is a nice find. I used to use WikiPad religiously until it seemed to go defunct.
I like the idea of Kinopio a lot because I use mindmaps heavily but find the hierarchical structure to be a limitation, this seems more lateral. Only problem is it's hosted, would love something like this in an app, like the aforementioned Joplin.
I love tools and have tried so many over the past year including these new "hot" ones like Roam and Notion. After all that I have come full circle and reinvested in making Evernote work better for me. It has limitations but has always had a big edge in the capture and storage part of the process. I'm still working on how best to author/render content from my work to the outside world but at least with Evernote I can get things in one place and then add notes, content, analysis where I can find it. I agree with some here that it's still hard to beat pen and paper for really creative stuff - it's so free.
Yes. This is how the reMarkable has changed my life. The way I am now able to access my own writings, reflections, etc is a completely different paradigm.
It's good enough for me. I don't think I've ever used Evernote's advanced features because I'm too lazy to organize things into books. It seems like they have an Evernote Import feature?
Same. I just canceled my EN subscription; it refreshed right before New EN, and I gave them until renewal to get that working. It’s still garbage and I have completely lost the habit of using it because I can’t revert to the old iOS app and have to use the slow, awkward new one.
I am currently evaluating Joplin as a maybe. It is webshit in an Electron wrapper but I think the only note app that isn’t webshit that I can use to collaborate with my Windows/Android using husband is Microsoft’s; it did a shit job of keeping my formatting last time I tried it, plus I hate the way it wants every note to be a text box floating in an infinite canvas.
I still have to actually check out Joplin’s collaboration, that only seems to work if you’re paying for their sync service instead of using something else.
Joplin also has a plug-in to do what EN couldn’t do in an entire decade: give you a nice diff UI for dealing with conflicting changes.
(My requirements: cross platform collaboration, decent EN import, not be webshit, deal gracefully with notes with PDFs and images in them.)
A little different but - whiteboard. Now that I have space I bought a 5x3 whiteboard and hung it on the wall. The contents on it kind of parallel the GTD system but for me it's helpful to have it "in my face" the whole time. Plus ability to think visually and draw out concepts.
I am partial to simple text files that I edit in vim.
I have a simple script that parses my notes (based on tags), puts them in respective files, and creates a new md file for the day.
I think it's important to have a space where the threshold for what needs to be written down is low and unstructured. Since vim is great at editing text (compared to writing), I use it as a space to dump my thoughts out and organize them in front of my eyes. Works great for me.
This is likely a result of me working in a corporate bureaucracy over the last few years, but I've observed executives using PowerPoint for the purpose of articulating and iterating on their thoughts, and it goes without saying that PowerPoint is ubiquitous (for good or for ill) when it comes to communicating those ideas to a wider audience.
It seems to me that the tools for thought community generally rallies around Excel as the best example of a "bicycle for the mind" due to its functional-reactive nature and its programmable core, but I feel like PowerPoint has made an equal contribution to the democratization of "augmenting collective intelligence" due to its affordances around outlining and presentation.
At my corporate job I oscillate between PowerPoint, word and excel depending on how I envision I’ll need to use the information. Often PowerPoint (as a presentation will be needed), but if I need to go to a detailed level excel is the go to, unless I need to write lots of words, then I’ll use word.
For notes, heirarchical notes and to do lists, I flip around between many tools.. ugh. Often just paper too.
That's interesting: I would have assumed academics would be less inclined to use tools like PowerPoint, but I guess I'm mistaken! It really goes to show how ubiquitous it is as a tool for thought. Do you mind if I ask what the context around those interviews was?
At the time we were considering writing some citation manager software and wanted to verify that other people had the same problems with the integration between Zotero and everything else.
I'd caution you to draw conclusions about academics! One reason we did not actually write the software was because we found academics to be high variance in their preferences.
The few people who used powerpoint for thinking would rather write out 20-30 citations by hand before touching Zotero. Someone else had a setup where one click would send articles from Chrome -> Zotero -> bib export -> Emacs org-mode + org-ref + org-roam
Roam Research was a game changer for me. - I know it’s expensive, the founder behaves arrogantly, but nontheless: They have created a product that is very unique. Many have imitated it’s feature-set (athens, org-roam, logseq to name a few), but they were first and paved the way.
What makes this product exceptional is the way it allows to link notes: Deliberately by surrounding words by doulbe brackets or automatically by linking notes that have the same keyword in them.
I started migrating my journal entries (date stamped) and my markdown notes into it, and I start to see connections among the notes that I did not make intentionally.
Slowly I start to come up with more and more categories for note taking that I want to do in Roam: Dream journal, reading notes, articles, research.
Before I was using Bear, Ulysses, Evernote, later I started using Emacs/org, now with a small detour settled with Roam.
I recommend taking a look Obsidian.md. I used Roam but now am in Obsidian because I can have my files with me, backup it the way I want, and it's free.
I personally prefer vscode-memo to Foam. It doesn't have a graphical view, but there a couple other things it does really well, especially its (optional) support for flattened wikilinks to hierarchically organized notes.
Instead of a big-ass text file, I recently started a 3-part memo system: (1) an Olympus VN541-PC voice recorder for thoughts while driving; (2) a pocket memo pad for notes where extra working memory is needed for thinking, like tables or lists; (3) a memo.txt file synced with my primary devices for convenience.
I've found this approach extremely powerful because I no longer need to figure out ahead-of-time where to put todos, ideas, questions, and my self-indulgent philosophical musing: everything that bubbles up to conscious mind is added to one of my memos and then will be filed into other note systems, categorized, and/or elaborated at my convenience in the future. There are quite a few things I've memoed that surprised me when looking back at it later in the day, because I had already forgot.
It makes me wonder how many interesting mental tidbits I've lost over the years before I started capturing/organizing them systematically.
136 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadThat sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?
I make a template Google Doc with the margins stripped out that I can copy anytime I need one.
I usually will throw on Dark Reader as well and use a monospace font.
Added benefits:
It's a cloud version of todo.txt.I feel like it should be easy to make Obsidian the content editor for a static site generator like Hugo, but I haven't found a tool for that yet. (Maybe it's so obvious that one isn't needed, but I'm not a dev, just a normie)
That said, if you don’t need special control over your content/presentation, then you could alternatively just pay Obsidian $8 a month for their Publish feature.
[1] https://logseq.com/
Also, the Syncing across devices they provide for $4/m right now is a steal and very effortless.
Of course you can take backups using Git, very easy.
could you (or anybody) elaborate?
what is different between Obsidian's inteded way of writing and Roam Research's??
Obsidian is able to do outlining with some plugins, but is primarily designed for writing notes.
I really far prefer Obsidian. If you want to get a good primer on things, lookup Linking Your Thinking on YouTube.
Definitely liked Obsidian's ecosystem a lot more than Roam's so I'm excited to give it another shot now that my one missing - but needed - feature is now available.
Edit: And one pretty annoying thing - it's built on old-school technology that doesn't even support setting the editor width. That's quite a problem in the era of widescreen monitors.
Which one? Zim or Obsidian?
I never used either, so I'm not sure which one you're referring to regarding this "editor width".
I maintain a small open-source script[^1] to find clusters and orphaned notes in a Zettelkasten, and I find it's a good addition to groom my notes from the terminal.
[^1]: https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHmevVAAXtu3_beDLtsTm...
- See/Hear some Japanese words I don't understand
- Search it on goo (Japanese dictionary website)
- Clip it with Markdownload (https://github.com/deathau/markdownload)
- Format it with my plugin
- Read the content, weave the backlinks
Keep doing this then I have the super complicated graph in the plugin demo gif you can see.
For the last little while, I converged on a local optimum in note taking: writing Markdown files with VS Code. VS Code (with the Markdown Preview plugin) lets me type math equations in LaTeX and draw block diagrams using Mermaid notation.
Turns out Obsidian supports Mermaid and LaTeX in Markdown too. And it runs on desktop and mobile devices. And has an elegant folder-based interface.
I’ve struggled with other second brain tools, but Markdown files with LaTeX and Mermaid support somehow just fit the way I think and work —- that is, I like writing lots of prose but still have the occasional need to draw diagrams and to write math, and have the doc transform into something that is aesthetically pleasing.
I think I need to give them some money.
- lack of quick capture from mobile (say when I find a good article and want to quickly create a note with a link + title)
- lack of WYSIWYG while creating a note, something like Typora -- i.e. I don't want to have to have a separate button to click to preview my markdown
But maybe others have hacks/workarounds for these?
https://www.thebrain.com/
I think the key for most of these, particularly BATF/BASS is the "always open" part. I've recently started playing around with Obsidian mentioned elsewhere and if you don't have it open at startup it's easy to forget about it. And you need to be pretty diligent at the beginning of adding interesting/educational things to your documents while you're still trying to form the habit.
Having a decent organization system is pretty important too (one of the main failings of BATF/BASS in my experience). If I need to scroll through a bunch of development and business stuff to find that interesting physics article that is suddenly relevant again I'm much less likely to do it than if I have a "physics" document or folder I can see and get to easily.
I use the common folder-of-text-files method (currently with Ulysses, although I've used other apps in the past). Any time I need to write something down, that's where I go first, unless I'm drafting a document that needs to be sent to someone else.
Here is when it gets used most:
- Researching something online
- Preparing for a call or meeting
- Taking notes on a call or meeting
- Random ideas I want to save
- Important information I want to keep (but not so secret that it needs to go in a password manager)
- Outlines of documents I want to write
- Snippets of code I want to save
And I agree with pc86's thoughts on 'decent organization system' and "always open". I am working on getting better at it with pen/paper.
I have a couple of macros set up to put in the current date, and a different color for bullet points that are "done" or not completed yet
This is the only one that works for me, and I've tried Org-mode, evernote, onenote, joplin, notion, etc. It's a combination of no-friction to open (I literally just press alt+~) and opinionless. If I want to paste something in there, I don't have to fiddle with a UI to get it how I want, because the formatting doesn't matter at all.
- in front of my computer when I am thinking
- in a meeting
- driving
- walking (grocery store, or to a place etc)
Note that each puts on a constraint, but I want the notes to sync.
When I am driving perhaps I need to speak into something that takes the notes without having to be turned on, hit the I am not driving button, find the app and launch it.
When I am walking, I need to take a note on my mobile and it cannot be a large graphical mind map.
In front of my computer -- this is where 99% of note taking apps shine and what they are made for.
In a meeting, especially in person or zoom, it is almost rude to type. It is perfectly acceptable, and almost polite, to write out notes by hand in a pad (it shows I care and am paying attention). I need to transcribe those notes later on.
The idea note taking system performs and syncs across these contexts well.
Manage this in git and you are independent of any service, yet with extensive-- perhaps even uncontested --feature-coverage.
And of course: https://dynalist.io
Both are infinitely nested tree editors, that enable you to organize information very conveniently. Great for writing, brainstorming, taking notes.
On iOS I use Editorial (a great text editor) to write down all my notes, and I use #tags to make it easy to search all my notes by topic (like #webdev, #health, #books, and so on).
Also Track and Share is a great habit tracker, and Things 3 is a great todo list manager. The more thoughts I can offload from my brain into the app - the better.
On my laptop I use Emacs org-mode, it's fantastic.
- Automatic hyperlinking – When you mention another page, a link is created on the go
- Aliases – A page can have multiple titles
- Properties – Meta data on page level
In my experience, this sort of visualization is good for mapping out an actual complex, sequential/staged process (and for that, one would instead use actual dedicated diagram maker apps). But other than that, it seems to be mostly for note-taking app makers to show off to show how cool their app is.
Mind maps help me realize things. I use a conference room whiteboard rather than an app.
Starting with asking a question as the root node like "Goals?" and then putting goals around that, and then from those goals, things I'd need to do to accomplish them. "Obligations?" and writing out various people/places/things I have obligations to, and then next what it means to fulfill those obligations.
Being able to look at it all on the whiteboard and pace around a bit seems to be very useful for me. This type of thing helps me sort things out and frequently I have realizations during it that make things more clear.
I mostly do project planning in outlines, but sometimes I will break out the whiteboard. Sometimes those are mind maps and will make me see missing pieces; frequently, I suppose they're diagrams and may not count.
I think the advantage of the mind map is using it as a tool to explore things I'm not entirely sure about and get more depth on them. Like in my examples, I choose Goals and Obligations as things I had used mind mapping for exploring. Once I have some of them written on the whiteboard, more like items start to come to mind that might not otherwise. I might also be conflating the value of any of the elements of this -- pacing in front of the whiteboard, it being a more physical representation by being big and hand-drawn, that it starts to look a bit like a puzzle. Then it starts to present all of these questions. Like after mapping out what my obligations were, it made sense to ask, "well, why?", and then tie those to core reasons, which started to get into agreements, which then made me think about agreements. Why do we form agreements? In a way, I suppose it's giving me space to go on a somewhat controlled and documented deep dive into my thoughts.
I still use onenote for mor multiporpose notes, specially when there are photoso involved, but Joplin is still my main note taking tool.
Backlinks out of the box.
Let me write a blog post about it. The author of this article in particular might find it useful. Does anyone do something similar?
I like the idea of Kinopio a lot because I use mindmaps heavily but find the hierarchical structure to be a limitation, this seems more lateral. Only problem is it's hosted, would love something like this in an app, like the aforementioned Joplin.
I’ll use it until they kill it. I’ve seen a few good “almost there” replacements, but each have their own quirks.
It's good enough for me. I don't think I've ever used Evernote's advanced features because I'm too lazy to organize things into books. It seems like they have an Evernote Import feature?
I am currently evaluating Joplin as a maybe. It is webshit in an Electron wrapper but I think the only note app that isn’t webshit that I can use to collaborate with my Windows/Android using husband is Microsoft’s; it did a shit job of keeping my formatting last time I tried it, plus I hate the way it wants every note to be a text box floating in an infinite canvas.
I still have to actually check out Joplin’s collaboration, that only seems to work if you’re paying for their sync service instead of using something else.
Joplin also has a plug-in to do what EN couldn’t do in an entire decade: give you a nice diff UI for dealing with conflicting changes.
(My requirements: cross platform collaboration, decent EN import, not be webshit, deal gracefully with notes with PDFs and images in them.)
Evernote for Android has gone from useless to barely usable, on my Xiaomi A3 phone. I guess it will keep improving.
The transition to the new Evernote has been a pain, but things are improving faster than I expected.
I have a simple script that parses my notes (based on tags), puts them in respective files, and creates a new md file for the day.
I think it's important to have a space where the threshold for what needs to be written down is low and unstructured. Since vim is great at editing text (compared to writing), I use it as a space to dump my thoughts out and organize them in front of my eyes. Works great for me.
It seems to me that the tools for thought community generally rallies around Excel as the best example of a "bicycle for the mind" due to its functional-reactive nature and its programmable core, but I feel like PowerPoint has made an equal contribution to the democratization of "augmenting collective intelligence" due to its affordances around outlining and presentation.
For notes, heirarchical notes and to do lists, I flip around between many tools.. ugh. Often just paper too.
I'd caution you to draw conclusions about academics! One reason we did not actually write the software was because we found academics to be high variance in their preferences.
The few people who used powerpoint for thinking would rather write out 20-30 citations by hand before touching Zotero. Someone else had a setup where one click would send articles from Chrome -> Zotero -> bib export -> Emacs org-mode + org-ref + org-roam
Super quick way to jot down notes, search through them, tag them if needed. May be useful :)
What makes this product exceptional is the way it allows to link notes: Deliberately by surrounding words by doulbe brackets or automatically by linking notes that have the same keyword in them.
I started migrating my journal entries (date stamped) and my markdown notes into it, and I start to see connections among the notes that I did not make intentionally.
Slowly I start to come up with more and more categories for note taking that I want to do in Roam: Dream journal, reading notes, articles, research.
Before I was using Bear, Ulysses, Evernote, later I started using Emacs/org, now with a small detour settled with Roam.
I personally prefer vscode-memo to Foam. It doesn't have a graphical view, but there a couple other things it does really well, especially its (optional) support for flattened wikilinks to hierarchically organized notes.
https://untools.co/
[1] https://zim-wiki.org/
Edit: it's obviously the big-ass text file, not a "real" method.
My primary note taking tool is apple notes, wish it had some additional features but by far my favorite is offline capability.
I've found this approach extremely powerful because I no longer need to figure out ahead-of-time where to put todos, ideas, questions, and my self-indulgent philosophical musing: everything that bubbles up to conscious mind is added to one of my memos and then will be filed into other note systems, categorized, and/or elaborated at my convenience in the future. There are quite a few things I've memoed that surprised me when looking back at it later in the day, because I had already forgot.
It makes me wonder how many interesting mental tidbits I've lost over the years before I started capturing/organizing them systematically.