personal_notes VS org-roam

I keep a relatively large amount of notes (1), which are fundamental to my learning.

My notes are essentially books in markdown format, which I can open with the editor/IDE I use when working on any project.

My opinions are:

- the vast majority of the effort is spent on cataloguing knowledge when adding new notes (that is, keeping each book consistently structured); this is something that no tool can do, and as a consequence, any tool will probably do equal.

- a consequence of the cataloguing effort is that the brain better remembers the topics stored.

- searching is where the other effort goes; I've found that as long as the books are consistently structured, and one puts a bit of effort to make concepts easily findable, a textual search does well. probably, a tool to do fulltext search may help in some cases, but I rarely find the need

For things that require rote memorization (say, System-V x64 calling conventions), I use Anki.

I take notes almost only for computer/science related stuff. If I had to catalogue diverse topics, I'd probably just use subdirectories.

(1): https://github.com/64kramsystem/personal_notes/tree/master/t...

It seems that this HN post got some interest, so here's my TIL repository: https://github.com/saveriomiroddi/personal_notes :)

I keep absolutely everything in a single folder. Saved documents, images, movies, financial records, game saves, it doesn't matter. My hierarchical naming scheme takes care of organization. On the odd occasion I actually need a folder, I just append ".d" to the filename.

I use . as a hierarchy delimiter, so file extensions are just part of the hierarchy, and I can have multiple files with the same name except for the extension. For example, "film.spongebob.png" is a photo of spongebob, "film.spongebob.org" is a note about spongebob, and "film.spongebob.s1.e7" is my favorite episode.

I use org-roam [1] for note-taking and task/time-management. I absolutely require a plain-text system so it either had to be markdown or org-mode. Emacs was the deciding factor, else I would have still been using Dendron [2]

If OneNote is your thing, I'd probably recommend Obsidian [3] over org-roam. Despite it being the greatest program ever created, Emacs is a lot to learn "just" for taking notes.

If you like VS Code, check out Dendron. It's the one that got me into more serious PKMS instead of just chucking notes in a folder all willy nilly.

- [1]: https://www.orgroam.com/

- [2]: https://www.dendron.so/

- [3]: https://obsidian.md/

I'm using org-roam to keep my notes, which generally works well for me. There's one thing I am missing and I'm wondering if I just overlooked it, or whether it simply doesn't exist.

Org-Roam is a Roam-inspired Emacs mode that builds on top of org mode. Every node (aka note) has a unique ID that's different from its name. Every link from node A to node B actually links to the ID, so you can change node B's name without affecting the link. When you're on node B, you can open the Roam buffer and it will show you all of the links that point to that node.

Org Mode. I can export my notes to LaTeX or HTML and keep things tidy in a zettelkasten with org-roam.

Of course, the real power-user move would be to use Emacs with Org-Roam, but you have to be prepared to dive deep into the rabbit-hole. If you don't, it won't be worth it. If you do, you'll be handsomely rewarded. I know because I have, and I can highly recommend it if you like tinkering with and customising your tools. IMO, Doom Emacs is the way to go nowadays.

I'd highly recommend Org-roam. It's what has enabled me to actually start consistently keeping notes (and being able to retrieve/access them later). It's very easy with Org-roam to quickly add new notes, or add information to old notes, and the links/backlinks make (re)discoverability very easy.