While I do think that there is a lot of hype and "productivity porn", there's a good 10% of it that is really on to something. There is obviously an itch that

While I do think that there is a lot of hype and "productivity porn", there's a good 10% of it that is really on to something. There is obviously an itch that needs scratching in personal knowledge base software. That has certainly been my experience. I can see from the outside it might just look like 100% hype. Personally, my life has been vastly improved with note taking software over the last four years. I can't imagine going back now. Some people I'm sure are ok with just a big text file. The software is almost not important. A new knowledge-base language is emerging, with Markdown-like formatting, but less emphasis on html style page breaking, [[wiki style]] links, and various syntaxes for backlinks and metadata. I've gone from vim-wiki, to various other systems, and migrating I was able to just do with some simple perl scripts. But my knowledge wikis have been effortlessly growing. I have a git repo now with many submodules for my different wikis. I really think that we are looking at this the wrong way. This is not nearly that much of a technical problem. This is just at the awkward stage where we are figuring out the best patterns for personal knowledge. It's not a problem that we will solve, but at least some good general strategies will probably emerge. Personally, I mostly just use a roam-like wiki, but I also have two Zettelkasten submodules as well. My two zetts deal with such different domains that it would be more helpful that they be in completely different namespaces. But yeah, most of the software is crap. The best tools I have found have been small user scripts for editors. I used an Atom based suite that handled my digital gardens. I've been moving to FOAM. I think the best thing you can do is try to learn from what has worked for other people, and not get too hung up on any one technology.