       _      __            __                  _ 
      (_)__  / /_________  / /________  _______(_)
     / / _ \/ __/ ___/ _ \/ __/ ___/ / / / ___/ / 
    / /  __/ /_(__  )  __/ /_/ /  / /_/ / /  / /  
 __/ /\___/\__/____/\___/\__/_/   \__,_/_/  /_/   
/___/

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Silly ramble about notes and knowledge bases

(Originally posted to Cohost on Wed, Jun 26, 2024, 3:37 PM)

(See also: ADHD Productivity Fundamentals on 0xFF)

I forgot to publish this post like a month ago, haha whoops. Well I'm still hyperfixated on it so I might as well.

Digital

So, as I get serious about acquiring knowledge, I noticed I love personal knowledge software. There are a lot of them: Obsidian, VimWiki, org-mode, Joplin, Zim, Wikidpad, whatever. If you haven't heard of them, they're like personal wikis, or somewhat like the memex.

All the ones I listed already store entries in plain-text, so lock-in is easier to avoid. Though, for fun, I've tried doing it my own "homemade" way with a text editor and a full-text search program:

Store my notes in plain text, with or without Markdown
Add tags or keywords at the start of notable files. I made them hierarchical, like "#topic/tech/linux", so if I search "#topic/tech", it will also show "#topic/tech/retrocomputing" and "#topic/tech/openbsd"
Use a program that can search through full-text. Even archaic OSes like MS-DOS and UNIX have these. I even tested it on a Commodore 64 running GEOWrite.

(A screenshot of a Commodore 64 emulator running GEOWrite, a word processor with search functionality. Tags can be searched through single files this way.)

I'm still trying to find some functionality to link certain files to each other this way, wiki-style. It works under vanilla Vim with Markdown hyperlink syntax, pointing to a relative file, moving your cursor to the filename, then typing gf to enter the file.

Analog

While I haven't looked into it deeply, Zettelkasten looks like a similar concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

Also, I love an idea a friend shared with me: having two notebooks. The first is for rough notes, while knowledge can be written in the second. An index or table-of-contents can be created at the start or end of a notebook to help you find pages. (I'd personally add numbers to the top of every page so it's easier to search the index.)