Wow. I guess I was wrong when I said that we have well and truly enough #Obsidian how-to tutorials out there. Either that or this person doesn’t have the faintest idea how to google properly.
@dhry I don't use obsidian, but I do have questions about the best way to structure my notes. Sometimes I want it by date, sometimes by topic. Do you have suggestion for a system?
@Mollarom That's a question to which I want to post one of my usual encyclopedic responses. But I'll try my best to be brief (looks like this reply will split into 4 entries despite that, thanks to mastodon.social and it's inane 500-char post limit).
There are systems out there that purport to help you arrange your life and digital data - I have my own method which works for me, but a lot of people like Thiago Forte's #PARA method, or the "Johnny Decimal" system. You ...1/4
might like to look into either of those wrt to "building a second brain". On the actual software side, the darlings of note-taking seem to be split into 2 1/2 camps. Either #obsidian (page-based knowledge - my personal preference), #logseq (block-based knowledge) or #orgmode, which I'm assigning the 1/2 to as I don't know much about it, not as many people seem into it and (to me) it's complicated and non-intuitive to start off with. Obsidian has a tree structure on the left, works ...2/4
@publicvoit@dhry How is there a "great deal of vendor lock-in" with Obsidian??? At it's core Obsidian is just a client for markdown files with wikilinking... files which are portable with dozens of editors on all platforms. Orgmode, as a file format, is a lot more niche, and I would say much more of a locked-in ecosystem.
@dhry The reason why some of us use #orgmode for #pkm stuff is that it can be configured to do whatever we want and work exactly the way we want.
Especially if you use it via #emacs, in which case either someone has already made a package that does exactly what you want or it can be written as elisp code by yourself.
Out of the box default experience may not be very shiny, but under the hood it's probably the most powerful tool there is.
@dhry@Mollarom like @masi said, it's infiniatly configurable. And especially for those of us who work with text constantly it's an amazing cross section of tooling that can be used within a single environment.
Sure pkm, notes. But also publishing to html, latex, docx, pdf, markdown, jira, confluence. Using llms. Email. Mastodon. Matrix. Version control. And nearly all of that easily funnels right into org-mode which also has functionality for project and todo management ...
Decades ago I floated between Things, OmniFocus, and Org mode. Neither commercial app (both very good!) could ever work EXACTLY how I wanted—which is crucial for PKM/GTD....
But I'LL HAVE TO LEARN EMACS LISP...!
It was worth it.
Thank goodness I was far enough along in career and life to see the long view.
If you're in a career where building your own tools matters at all, here is the secret: INVEST IN CUMULATIVE INCREMENTAL GAINS OVER THE LONG TERM
@harish@jameshowell@dhry@masi@Mollarom Beauty is subjective but I have ~80 capture templates most frequently I type SPC ocdwll (SPC is spacemacs leader, o is custom binding, then c for capture d daily w work l log log). It's pretty darn quick even if it looks like a lot of keystrokes, it's faster than mousing.
Neat, could you tell me how Things handles task or note creation directly from emails, rss feeds? Or flipcards like Anki for learning purposes? Because my orgmode setup handles both of those with a breeze.
The power of orgmode is just that, I can make it work exactly the way I want to the smallest nitty gritty detail and combine it with other services. Have some cool feature in some other app? Great, if I like it I can replicate it in org.
@masi I am not disagreeing with how great orgmode is, I am a long term user and lifetime Emacs user.
My question is how do people handle easy capture from other devices that are not your primary computer. Polished iOS apps allow for a form of capture that‘s fundamentally different in flavour. And I happen to use Things to grab things on the fly.
@harish I don't use mobile devices in that manner so I don't have working example. I use Syncthing to sync my files between all my computers and mobile devices.
I have heard there is OrgNote? app for Android while some use emacs on their Android phones which definitely solves the issue.
I don't have any problem with others using whatever tools they want. I'm simply trying to explain reasoning behind my (and many others) decision to rather use single point of entry aka orgmode for everything.
@masi Understood and thank you. I just don’t have access to my primary computer in many circumstances when I have ideas pop up. Hence the journey continues. Maybe there is an OrgNote equivalent for my phone and that’ll work well.
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