silicon VS logseq

It's nowhere near as featureful as Outline, but I wrote my own Markdown knowledge base thingy in Python. It is web-based and geared toward single-user (or _very_ small team use) but it's Apache licensed and has no commercial tie-ins. Super easy to deploy as long as you know how to layer some rudimentary authentication on top of it.

https://github.com/cu/silicon

I wrote my own note-keeping system[0] and very much wanted all of the notes to just be markdown files on the disk. It turns out that there are trade-offs to this. If you want plaintext markdown files on disk AND want fancy features like file versioning, a search index, tags, etc then you need to store all of that metadata somewhere and you're down writing a half-assed implementation of a DBMS.

Now, you can certainly bite the bullet and full-ass the implementation like Dokuwiki did, but that is really quite a lot of work and effort against simply `import sqlite` and writing a couple of tutorial-level queries. And it turns out that exporting all of your documents to plaintext, if you should so choose, is a one-line command away.

[0]: https://github.com/cu/silicon

I wrote my own. It's a web app but one of its features is that it doesn't have many features. https://github.com/cu/silicon

It doesn't have folders and tags, but if that's not a deal-breaker you could check out https://github.com/cu/silicon

Not sure which features you're looking for, but you could try this thing I wrote: https://github.com/cu/silicon

3. Very occasionally, I will click on a link on one page to go to another page.

And what would be the point of categorizing all my notes? Every single time I go to my wiki, it's to either write down something specific or search for something specific. I have _never_ wanted to see a list of all of my pages about programming languages for example. Or every page tagged "bash".

I think as software engineers building our own tools, we sometimes build features because they sound interesting and we know how to do it, or because the project doesn't "feel" complete without them. Not because we'll ever actually use them.

When I _do_ want to break up a large subject (e.g. Python) into multiple pages, I just create one "Python" page and link to all of the others from that page.

The one concession I've made to categorization/organization is that I've added a feature where two pages can be marked as "related" to one another. This is mainly to avoid having a manually-edited "See Also" section on pages that touch upon topics covered on other pages.

[1]: https://github.com/cu/silicon

Logseq support via our Logseq Plugin

Sorry, but _what exactly_ «it seems to do» from your point of view?

My «second brain» now is almost 300Mb of text, pictures, sound files, PDF and other stuff. As I already mentioned, it contains tables, mathematical formulae, sheet music, cross-references, code samples, UML diagrams and graphs in Graphviz format. It is versioned, indexed by local search engine, analyzed by AI assistant and shared between many computers and mobile devices. And (last but not least) it works: it allows me to solve my tasks way more faster than with the assistant of external, non-personalized tools (like ChatGPT, StackExchange or Google).

I know no tools for all this tasks except org-mode. Well, maybe Evernote in the 2010-s was something similar — but with less features, with more bugs and with worse interface.

Personal note-taking _is_ a complex task per se (well, at least for someone like typical HN visitor). I've seen many note-taking tools, that were ridiculously featureless, stupid and inconvenient because they were _not_ complex enough.

> Sure if one wants to do emacs-gardening it is fine.

1)You can use org-mode outside Emacs. See for example Logseq (https://logseq.com/), organice (https://organice.200ok.ch/) or EasyOrg.

2)Org-mode works in Emacs out of the box, you don't need any «emacs-gardening» to use org-mode.

3)The term «Emacs-gardening» itself sound a bit like hate-speech for me. The complexity of Emacs customization is overrated, mostly due to opinions of people who never used Emacs or used it in the previous millennium.

Obsidian is great.

For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/

For an opensource alternative to Obsidian checkout Logseq (1). I spent a while thinking obsidian was opensource out of my own ignorance and was disappointed when I learned it was not.

1: https://logseq.com/

I use logseq to keep journal of my daily work.

While Emacs and Org mode can certainly be used for this (and, when they can't, you can always inject little python/js scripts in your emacs config to take care of specific things), I'd also recommend you take a look at Logseq.