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I do think that the area of knowledge management is very interesting and worthy of discussion. When it comes to tooling though, I've tried out a couple and I do
by esperent 6y ago
I do think that the area of knowledge management is very interesting and worthy of discussion. When it comes to tooling though, I've tried out a couple and I don't find anything superior to a folder full of markdown files + your favorite text editor (I use VSCode, but I don't think that's especially important).
Systems like Zettelkasten are interesting to read about, but again, everyone's brain is different and for me a bunch of folder categories and one misc/daily folder is just as good.
On a purely personal level, any tooling or system more complex than what I already use is unnecessary.
- SquishyPanda23 6y agoOne thing this ecosystem is missing is a measure of how effective people are after switching from one tool or another. E.g. our company implemented the use of Zettelkasten in a randomized trial and engineering efficiency improved by x% in the experimental group compared with y% in the control group. It seems like much of the ecosystem is like some areas of the Linux ecosystem, where the goal is more to focus on getting the tools and process just so than on the impact the tooling has on actual productivity.
- jpxw 6y agoHow do you quantify “efficiency“?
- SquishyPanda23 6y agoHowever you like. Presumably people invest in these tools for some reason. Maybe "developer ergonomics survey results" is one definition of the goal is just for people to feel more in command of their area of work.
- iamstupidsimple 6y ago<s>Lines of code / time</s>
- Kinrany 6y agoRe: research on engineering efficiency, there needs to be a baseline to compare with, and a way to make the studies reproducible.
- SquishyPanda23 6y agoYes, I agree. That's why my example was a randomized trial. But you could also compare with a baseline from results in the previous year or whatever.
- nl 6y agoI can't imagine any really defensible way to measure this quantitatively. Research outcomes are almost impossible to measure in the first place (see debates about citation metrics). Qualitative research would be somewhat useful, but there's issues with that approach too.
- kiba 6y agoSystems like Zettelkasten are interesting to read about, but again, everyone's brain is different and for me a bunch of folder categories and one misc/daily folder is just as good. I find that folders/tags inevitably just run into the issue of notes not fitting into any particular schema. So often time I just use the search function, or use a particular note that consist mostly of only organized links. This way I can have multiple schema of organization even if they overlap. Or rather, overlap is a good thing. It means you have multiple ways to find a given subject.
- esperent 6y agoThe schemas are not that important though, I just use search 90% of the time anyway.
- endymi0n 6y agoSince realizing this about 5 years ago, I‘ve actually started optimizing for it. Whenever I hit cmd+s, I make sure to enter a search mindset and make the file name as keyword heavy and stemming friendly as possible. For smaller notes, I just have Sublime Text open with iCloud sync and operate freely with hundreds of tabs. Since then, any thought has never been more than a Spotlight search or a „find in files“ away.
- emj 6y agoStemming and keyword enrichment is something I've never seen done really good so I'm not sure you can build a tool that is good for it.
- pqdbr 6y agoSame here. I've tried many different Markdown tools along the way. However, keeping everything in Sublime (files in Dropbox) is specially nice because I'm always one `cmd ~` away from having my notes, and one `CMD SHIFT F` from finding exactly what I need.
- andrei_says_ 6y agoWhat do you do about images in this setup?
- kolias 6y ago> I do think that the area of knowledge management is very interesting and worthy of discussion. When it comes to tooling though, I've tried out a couple and I don't find anything superior to a folder full of markdown files + your favorite text editor (I use VSCode, but I don't think that's especially important). I'd say the most valuable thing these tools provide is a way to link notes. That's the part that was missing from most of my attempts to build my own knowledge base, creating connections between the things I find and store in a way that's personal to how I think. In the end, my ZK is nothing but a folder filled with md files that are all linked with each other in some way. It's synced to my phone and my tablets, so I always have them with me and I can always amend or work on them.
- bostonvaulter2 6y agoHow do you sync them to your phone?
- _zg4q 6y agoI'm not the poster you're asking, but I've been using Syncthing [0] for anything I need to share with my phone (or any other device for that matter). Very simple and fast to get using. [0] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- bostonvaulter2 6y agoThat's on my list to checkout. Will have to get to that soon.
- esperent 6y agoI don't especially feel the need to access them on my phone. I'm generally looking for ways to use my phone less, not more. When I'm out and about and need to save some info, I put it on Google keep then transfer whatever I've accumulated once a week or so.
- vvillena 6y agoA Zettelkasten-style system is just a bunch of files in a single folder, with lots of links between them. What makes these kinds of notes work is the purpose they are written for, and the links. Two people can have the exact same notes, but link and tag them completely differently, because each of them will have different goals and purposes.
- jldugger 6y agoSo basically a personal Wiki for generation Z.
- nemetroid 6y agoWhy is it for generation Z?
- jldugger 6y agoCuz as a millenial I've been using tomboy / gnote as a personal wiki long before 'zettlekassen' showed up on HN, and I know a few others who run more online wikis.
- nemetroid 6y ago...but zettelkasten is a concept that's hundreds of years old, so it seems strange to assign it to a young generation. I think it would be more accurate to say that personal wikis are the millenials' zettelkasten.
- jldugger 6y agoI'm doing so because the trend of calling your notes by a old german word seems to be the new innovation here.
- jyounker 6y agoIf you consider people born in 1927 (the inventor of the system) to be generation Z, then yes.
- lioeters 6y agoI'm in the same camp, all my notes are in Markdown files, organized as a tree of folders. Some folders are prefixed with YYYY or YYYY-MM, when needed. My text editor, also VS Code, has extensions for Markdown live preview, to-do lists, and other conveniences - everything I need to manage the "knowledge database". In the terminal, `find` and `grep` are perfect for searching notes. I have a few aliases defined for quickly adding new single-line notes, current date/time, paste a link and title, etc. As a higher-level interface, I wrote a little React app / Node.js server that renders the Markdown files, with hot reload on changes. Not necessary, but I like having a "personal dashboard" of sorts, with calendar and whatever feature/widgets I want to add. I also join the chorus, that we ought to welcome more exploration in the area of knowledge management. I love seeing new systems, open-source projects, applications, SaaS (though not as much) taking on this problem space. Since the days of index cards, through Vannevar Bush's Memex, Ted Nelson's Xanadu, Englebart's mother of all demos, HyperCard.. In some ways I think the past decade took a step forward and a couple steps back. The personal computer, as an augmentation of the human intellect, has creative potential yet to be explored. --- Edit: A recent one I found delightful is the Johnny Decimal System. https://johnnydecimal.com/ https://johnnydecimal.com/
- zikani_03 6y agoI also rely on Markdown files and typically write very short content in each file, especially to help with my memory. I tried Google Keep, Evernote and at some point pain-stakingly migrated all the notes I had to Notion, but they are missing "something" I don't know yet so I regressed back to markdown files in a directory. I created a tool to automatically structure files into a directory tree based on file dates because of this: github.com/zikani03/groupby It is really great to see more attention given to this space. That and personal relationship management tools (e.g. Monica)
- kuzimoto 6y agoSounds like your writing style fits with how TiddlyWiki[0] works. I just started using it, but like it so far. Has a plug-in for editing in Markdown as well. [0] https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/
- ChuckMcM 6y agoSounds like this system would work really well for you. All it adds to "a folder full of markdown files + text editor" are a way of putting identifiers into those notes that lets you link them.
- m-p-3 6y agoI do think that Markdown hits the sweet spot between complexity and ease of use for quickly writing notes. I do use an app called Joplin[1] because it can sync to some cloud services with End-to-End Encryption directly within the app, has a mobile app available for Android and iOS and because it includes some other features I find useful when I want to polish my notes and include some diagrams using MermaidJS[2]. [1]: https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ [2]: https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/examples https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/examples
- dheera 6y agoI usually just use straight up HTML. <b> and <i> and the syntax of <table> are a lot easier for me to remember than some weird funky *'s and |'s. <img src=""> is also plain obvious, compared to some weird []!@() BS that I can never remember. Top it all off with a custom CSS file and I'm done.
- Thorentis 6y agoI started using Joplin but found myself trying to use it like a personal wiki, when it really isn't meant for that. I want a fast way to link my notes together. Zettlr looks like it has exactly that in mind, so I'll probbaly switch to Zettlr, and push for cloud sync/encryption to be added.
- GhostVII 6y agoI wrote a tool for myself that will just open up your default editor and create a new markdown file for every note you want to take, saving them in a git repo that you can sync to some remote. Has the simplicity of a directory full of markdown files, but also provided a system to tag the different notes, search for a particular note to view or modify, and view a subset of them in an HTML document. All of that can be done with different command line tools of course but it is nice to have it all bundled into a single program.
- maremp 6y agoDo you have the tool somewhere to share? I was looking into writing a simple tool, preferably a bash script I can use cross-platform, which creates a new markdown file with named with today’s date and opens it with $EDITOR. This way I can also hook it to other tools, such as alfred pr albert.
- input_sh 6y agoNot as simple as a bash script, but Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/) has this as a plugin. Basically a button in the interface. You click on it and it creates a markdown file with today's date (example: YYYY-MM-DD). If one already exists, it just uses that one. You can also have a template that will be used when a new note is generated.