- 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
The problem with a lot of existing strategies is they are aspirational - rather than realistic: conforming to our limitations. We can only write so much, and remember for so long. Have an idea, write it down, half way through you might have forgotten the original idea or become distracted by something else. I think it's just starting to come to light with the Roam-style tools, that imposing structure from the beginning doesn't work (too aspirational?), so I'd propose that aside from the happy surprises of the Zettelkasten only bound by relationships to other notes, its much more in tune with the way Minds work to have more unstructured notes. Individual islands that relate to others, but not strict hierarchies, or at least let the hierarchies be interchangeable.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Highly recommend Workflowy (https://workflowy.com/). Its core idea is just recursive lists. Everything is a list, and every bullet can be expanded to become a top-level list. I've found this to be the most natural way for me to organize information, and there is a satisfying symmetry to it.
The developers are also clearly careful when adding new features, since they always compose well with existing functionality and create a multiplier effect on productivity.
I suspect the new features starting to come into Workflowy last year is due to Roam Research which came out about then, and has largely been at best a slight improvement over Workflowy.
I do use Roam personally, but they were very hamfisted with their monetisation effort early on, which left a bad taste in my my mouth. If I were starting today, I would use Workflowy and be paying them instead. From what I can see, it is the more carefully built product.
Mirroring + templates is a gamechanger. Being able to create boards is also really nice; whoever realized that lists are isomorphic to boards is a genius. You can switch between the two seamlessly without ever being afraid of losing information or causing unintended side effects!
Just waiting for it to support reminders, at which point I feel like I could use it for everything.
Been using it for about a decade too. Syntax highlighting, quick capture and mobile reminders are still on my wishlist, but so far it's still better than all other competitors for me.
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.
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.)
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've had a persistent desire for a knowledge management protocol/service that goes beyond the scope of all the software and strategies discussed on HN regularly. I firmly believe that the needs and barriers are pretty universal between people (not personal preference or individual at all) and that in a way, we are rate-limited without it, bound to arrive at solutions only for them to be lost again. I have a dense page in my Zettelkasten dedicated to the idea, but in summarizing it's meant to provide an interoperable framework that accepts different forms of media (not just text, though it would be central) and facilitates various kinds of analysis and thought, e.g. detecting similarities, duplication, extrapolating etc. I'd imagine a specialized form of distributed version control would be needed, and various platforms and tools to solve the capture and retrieval dilemma, and in particular the problem of persistence and link rot. To be sure all I have is a list of problems and some possible clues for solving, but the most hopeful of those is a distributed service that is widely used but very open. It could consist of some commercialized tools or engines, but the underlying protocol must be open for anyone to use.
If the idea I have took off it would take the information age to new heights, with the next phase being ubiquitous use of brain-computer interfaces.
Imagine how productive we would all be if we never forgot. All ideas, perhaps even a collection representing all of humankind, transcribed to a format that respects our time, and aids further thought.
We can reach in and take the ideas that work from other systems, such as Zettelkasten, Nogutchi Filing System, The Web and any of it's parts (markup, protocols), the study of sciences, humanities etc.
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.
A friend of mine today just wrote to me about Kinopio, whether have been bought by some SV firm and it was our new brand. I can assure you, it couldn't be further from the truth - OrgPad.com is in my mind way more advanced and overall better designed tool for both small things and complex thoughts. It is used a lot by anybody from school children to top managers, specialists and academics. What we do much better than most tools in my mind is design of the user experience and simplicity, where we have been inspired by 40 years of research of Zdeněk Hedrlín PhD., Clojure(Script) the programming language we use and Apple when there was still Steve Jobs around.
We don't fear to do hard engineering to improve the user experience. We calculate differential equations on most animations in real time to simulate dampened spring movements. This is quite fast. Together with parts of the rendering rewritten into canvas rendering (e.g. links), OrgPad is now a lot faster than before. We have auto-resize and topologically mostly stable auto-layout, we support rich multimedia in OrgPages, images (even with transparency), iframes so you can embed other OrgPages, videos or even e.g. Google Spreadsheets or Calendar in the canvas. You can read an overview directly in OrgPad here: https://orgpad.com/s/VjMKIa7bfnN
And no, OrgPad is not trying to be a graph database more or less like Roam-research or a Zettelkasten clone. It is oriented more towards those, that think visually and want to mirror their brains in a natural way to have an opportunity to step back and look at it.
To be most transparent: You can try OrgPad for free. We will introduce the pricing on 29th of August (in a few days from now) but leave a limited free tier without adds forever. The standard tier will cost ~5 €/ month and include 5 GB of storage and most OrgPad features although limited. The professional tier for ~10 €/month will include all the bells and whistles plus 10 GB of storage and priority support. Until now, we have worked on the product itself - we are not a traditional startup, so we can afford this less traditional approach.
I hope, this will be understood as a frank recommendation for a tool, that might solve the readers problem in a more fitting way.
So happy to see Joplin on here. I adore it, as it doesn't try to be as big and full-featured as the flavor-of-the-month (currently Obsidian but surely something else come September).
Syncing which supports more than just a paid service or forces you into a brand name (my own WebDAV works for me). Encryption. Flexibility. Just love it.
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.
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.
A grandfather to this space is Ward Cunningham. His latest work is FederatedWiki, a javascript platform which enables a lot of thinking; with plugins, you can push it in many directions. As a "federated platform" you can work in groups
http://fed.wiki.org/view/federated-wiki
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Ok, so this seems like a great thread to ask this question.
I want a research tool with the following features:
- Collaborative
- Cloud based with offline mode (changes can be synced back up)
- History
- Separate workspaces/projects
- The repository would be "taggable", meaning that after I set all the notes in a project as "v1" I can interact with the research with that snapshot, further when I create a "v2" I can see everything that has changed since "v1".
- Media files (images) can be added
Secondary concerns
- The ability to "comment" in a collaborative manner.
- an API to extract the data
- Native apps
- Dead simple end user workflow, (ex, don't have to run git commands)
- Simple user permissions (ex. read only, contributor, admin)
If your team is okay with using markdown and git (can be GUI), I think Github wikis would fit the bill rather well. Through the web interface, you can upload images by drag & dropping them.
I'm imagining whatever product would use git as a base, but Github wiki's itself doesn't offer anything that would benefit someone doing research, from UX to creating relationships between documents.
If you fall into the *Big-Ass Text File* approach, I would recommend Dendron.so
It's an open source plaintext based note taking tool that runs inside VSCode with the option to add additional structure to your text using schemas (think type system but for your notes)
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>
Thanks for mentioning Joplin! Personally I don't use it as a Zettelkasten tool, but I tend to use it to throw ideas in lots of checkbox lists and sub-checkbox lists, which I guess is a similar concept.
Instead of linked notes, you end up with a hierarchy of checklists, and when you go back to it you can easily check what wouldn't work (which grays out the sub-tree), or what's been done, or move around the lists. It works well for me as it means it's all in one note so you get a quick overview of the whole thing.
There are different types of note taking. For random items, I use lists like Trello. For lots of non-transferrable knowledge, I use a wiki like Notion.
I haven't liked the note taking tools for learning, so I've been building a prototype to do it better. It's like Roam, but is planned to be crowd sourced and self organizing.
https://www.conceptionary.app/
I use Notepad++ like the author to keep a big a** text file but split it into separate files per quarter; they typically contain ideas which then make it to Notion if I'm really excited about them. But it's really hard to commit to online tools over simplicity of a git repo full of text files.
I also have a text file with 'comments from HN' which I revisit randomly and prompts either research or just nice trivia.. so thank y'all ;)
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.
There's an old(ish) tool by the name of NoteLiner, no longer maintained. If you can find a copy which isn't too buggy (3.3 is the best), I've never found a better outlining tool for methodically breaking down a task or concept. In particular, the use of CTRL+Space as a quick way to collapse/expand a tree is really efficient. NoteLiner is also less restrictive than most other outlining applications, as it's more of a blend of a text editor than something that imposes a rigid structure. Best used in conjunction with George Polya's "How to solve it" method :)
You can achieve a similar workflow in Visual Studio Code with markdown, but it takes a little more work.
I see a ton of recommendations that invite you to blurt out all your thoughts and capture them, but after you do that for a while... what tools/processes help you know what you can delete or let go of?
I have kind of a home-grown anti-todo list system that is hooked up to my life principles, such that if an "oh, I should do this" idea doesn't actually line up with them, I just don't add it to the list. But that's pretty manual and home-grown.
I don't know, it's just that the "capture every thought" genre of software was attractive in my 20s, but after a point it just gets overwhelming.
I just use a single static HTML file that lets me organize my notes and TODOs in five big buckets of life and track high level goals. All manually entered and data is only ever stored in the browser's localStorage so it remains completely private.
I highly recommend TiddlyWiki. The name puts a lot of people off, but it is really great. Supports backlinks and transclusion, among the more typical tagging and linking.
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.
Surprising how few people mention an email addressed to oneself, particularly for those concerned about getting their thoughts out quickly. (Maybe a side effect of how many people use Gmail and it being slow and clunky?) Not saying it's brilliant by any means, but conceptually, it makes a certain amount of sense. Imagine having an assistant you can trust completely, and you don't have to worry about hurting their feelings or ever needing to stop to think whether you need to phrase things in a certain way. You'd lean on them for stuff like this, right? Now, instead of an assistant, it's just you explaining things to you.
If you've always got your mail client open then speed bumps are minimal, and you get optional titles, automatically dated entries, and search for "free".
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.
