Ask HN: What do you use to organize your knowledge?
What are the tools, tricks, systems you use to record things you learn? Notebooks, text files, software or cloud apps? Do you have any custom, inventive ways to maintain your personal knowledge base?
80 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadDoes wonders.
Finally, I put all the interesting web articles in Pocket, because I search them later.
I tried to make flashcards in Anki for random stuff, but it didn't work out.
Source: https://evernote.com/legal/tos.php
And the preceding clause: In order to enable Evernote to operate the Service, we must obtain from you certain license and other rights to the Content you submit so that our processing, maintenance, storage, technical reproduction, back-up and distribution and related handling of your Content doesn’t infringe applicable copyright and other laws.
You can't read half of a line of a TOS and assume it means something separate from the totality.
It's cross-platform, with a functional free version. I have no problem paying for good, useful software, especially (as in this case) when it's produced by a dedicated individual or small company.
Evernote is overrated...
Shame, as I really liked penultimate.
As soon as Simplenote allow font changes, I'm going back though for the Android cross platform support.
I've tried so many other things but a single text file sitting on my desktop just seems to work really well.
[1]: http://www.christopherbiscardi.com/
So I use paper notes as a backup, but as someone else noted, good old fashioned Brain 1.0.
But when that isn't enough, paper files are good for formal stuff.
On the computer, well, it's kind of a disaster. Gmail has helped here. But there is no compelling note organization system. And I'm not sure you'd want one, I think we've learned is that 'findability' is the most important feature, and organization isnt the only way to achieve that.
I often have a text file open on my computer that I write quick notes in. Most of my knowledge that isn't like a random reminder note lives in my head though, I'm pretty solid on my memory.
We use Trello for business, so I keep anything business related in there, so other people have access to it if need be.
In a specific directory, I arrange notes according to subject in directories, and the script parses them and spits out HTML files that displays them in a fashion I find useful. With MathJax, I can render LaTeX. It also spits out an index files so I can see at a glance my subjects and notes on those subjects.
I've been giving some thought to doing something more involved, so I can get full text search capabilities from the index page. It's something I play around with every so often as the inspiration hits me. I will not be surprised if this posts leads me back to playing with it for a bit, although I am busy for the upcoming week already.
You can trivially get something similar with something like vimwiki [0]. The only reason I went further was that I wanted greater levels of customization.
[0] https://code.google.com/p/vimwiki/
Edit: The full text search from the index is just a nicety given the way I like having the notes displayed. I can already grep from the command line, of course. I have other ideas about nice-to-have dynamic behaviour, but a lot of the stuff falls into the lower percentages of the 20% of the 80-20 split.
In The Pragmatic Programmer, one of the tips advocates keeping knowledge in plain text:
> Keep Knowledge in Plain Text
> Plain text won’t become obsolete. It helps leverage your work and simplifies debugging and testing.
The full text expands on the benefits, such as searchability and other stuff I can't recall at the moment.
I try to stay as close to possible to plain text as I can. Even Markdown is a bit heavy for the task, although I have given some thought to adopting it and avoiding needing any custom parsing.
Lastly, I wasn't clear why I output to HTML. I put them up on a server so that I can access them remotely. I can also upload notes, or input a quick note to a textarea and submit it. It's device-agnostic; I just need a browser. I haven't bothered to implement making currently existing notes editable.
[1]: org-mode is a mode for the emacs editor - http://orgmode.org/
[2]: http://orgmode.org/manual/LaTeX-fragments.html#LaTeX-fragmen...
I have quite a system, but it works. I'm a student, and I utilize Evernote, Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote, Pocket, 8x11 ringed notebooks, and a small field book.
Evernote is for items I may need to a long time: recipes, guides from the internet, personal notes, etc. I'm finding I don't use it much, actually. :-/
Google Keep is incredible for to-do lists, quick notes, this sort of thing.
OneNote is my primary note-taking program, for meetings, for class, anything. I just bullet everything and go at it.
Pocket for saving articles. It has an incredible search function.
8x11 ringed notebooks for times where a laptop is inappropriate, or when I need to physically draw something.
The field notebook was a gift. I use it to host my big ideas and inspirations.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okIAAeb2WVA
Yeah, I use Org mode for my personal wiki. I previously had notes in hundreds of files of various formats, and I eventually moved all of my notes to an Org mode wiki. Also, my wiki has replaced my collection of thousands of bookmarks. I couldn't imagine living without my wiki at this point. It's such an important part of my workflow.
Years ago when I decided to switch to a personal wiki, Org mode met my requirements far better than the dozens of other wiki solutions that I evaluated. I'd be interested to know if there are any new wiki or note-taking solutions that have as many features[1] as Org mode.
[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/
Realizing that there is no such system/app I split things out:
* Important Stuff as well as trivia -> CalDav... believe it or not, but CalDav beats most other systems/apps out there, it's accessible on almost any device and you usually have a wide variety of applications to edit your "calendar events", use different calendars for important vs trivia
* Stuff you read on the internet -> obviously (synced) bookmarks (firefox, chrome, opera and others have builtin sync)
* Ideas, plans, drawings -> A5 pen and paper notebook (most people will advocate moleskine, I prefer Leuchtturm notebooks (to each his/her own)
* Research, papers, references -> good old text files, index + txt + pdf + bib (vim + vimwiki + git + some zsh alias like wiki="cd ~/wiki/; git pull; vi index.wiki; git commit -a; git push; cd -")
So far, this works quite well, although I have to admit that while separation is king, it also hinders creativity at times, so I'm slowly starting to integrate other things into the wiki (write firefox bookmark and caldav importer/parser, thinking about scanning/digitizing notebooks...) to be able to cross-reference things. The long term goal is to create a visualization that allows me to visualize (duuuh) all this data in different ways (especially useful for research and connecting the dots).
Hope this helps and I would really be interested how others manage this, especially regarding research, papers etc (Mendeley and others just aren't flexible enough for me...).
[1] http://gitit.net/
* plain text edited in vim ;-)
* links (to other wiki pages and content), move cursor over link and <Enter> will open wiki page, link in browser, image in image viewer, pdf in ... all from your console
* manages todo lists (including status indicator auto update for sublists: [.]->[o]->[O]->[X])
* headers (mostly useful when exporting to html)
* table creation and management
Overall a very lightweight and tightly integrated vim plugin, but gitit looks quite interesting, might give it a try.
Github wiki
[1] http://orgmode.org
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.matburt.mo... (there are others... /search?q=orgmode&c=apps for more)
For anything more, I use my laptop where I can take advantage of all the proper org-mode functionality.
It might come down to how you use org-mode, as well. I create a .org file for each client/project. If I'm using org-mode to write a document (beats markdown IMO), I'll create a separate file and store it in the client/project registry (my own mgt system, outside of org-mode scope but implemented with org-mode knowledge).
Having lots of relatively sparse but easily identifiable (and discoverable) .org files makes mobileorg quite usable, for me.
ps: I see you commented on org-mode elsewhere in this topic. I also make heavy use of a notepad (unlined paper please - you're not the boss of me!), but prefer pencil to pen. I have about 6 or so high quality pencils I keep on high rotation, nice and sharp courtesy of a burr sharpener.
* Bullet Journal (http://bulletjournal.com)
* Instapaper -> Pinboard.in
* Research Diary in LaTeX (http://www.writelatex.com)
* Markdown (pandoc) and git for each and every project
I am the cofounder of MyMundus, so my opinion is quite biased. We started MyMundus because conventional note taking apps such as bookmark services did not suffice, especially when you forgot to create a bookmark.
There's a lot of synergy between the three.
It is so convenient and quick to make notes and hyperlink notes between them and do full text search.
[1] http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ [2] http://notational.net/
[1] http://www.giantyak.com/notesy/
I tried many, cloud apps, desktop apps, wikis. But in the end, I was never comfortable with putting all my thoughts in documents in a weird format (at best) or in the cloud (at worst). And most apps didn't offer any huge advantage to compensate for that.
I have backups of my notes folder. I can grep through it when I'm looking for something. I can edit it from any computer. And I know it will still be readable in 10 years.
But I use this to write down things I would consider more 'information' than 'knowledge'. If it's a new cloud app I found on HN that I might need later, I write it down. If I learned something new (for example, I recently learned about phage therapy as an alternative to antibiotics), I resist the temptation and try to integrate it into my existing body of knowledge. In my opinion, if you have a 'fact' that needs to be memorized, then it is either a bit of arbitrary information or it is not yet tethered to the rest of your knowledge and is therefore banging around in your head. I usually find a link to nail it down. I wouldn't exactly call it a 'memory palace' but it's sort of like that.