personal_notes VS zim-desktop-wiki

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'll slightly modify your argument; because Pure HTML does suck:

Why don't people make static sites with a simple "Markdown-or-Similar to HTML" converter, CSS, and vanilla JS...etc?

(This is what I do, btw -- http://zim-wiki.org + a template)

You should add Zim [1] to the "Personal Knowledge Management" section :)

[1] https://zim-wiki.org

https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

And I just tweaked the CSS and added a bit of logic to included the possibility of one image per slide; as well as editing slides not with raw HTML but with https://zim-wiki.org (because that's what I'm really used to, I'm sure any Markdown thing would work just as well).

Absolutely; recently I realize I wish I'd never learned vim. I use too many other programs that are at least CUA-ish ( http://zim-wiki.org is the most important app I use ) and now I kind of want out. I haven't yet tried Modeless Vim, but that looks like my next experiment.

https://github.com/SebastianMuskalla/ModelessVim

It is so hard not to feel REALLY SMUG reading stuff like this, as someone who has run my own website as the working primary source for my college instruction for the past 15 years or so using https://zim-wiki.org. (before Markdown was much of a thing!)

It's borderline bizarre to have watched this method of doing things kind of die out, and then also come back in the form of "static site generators" -- which, frankly, are still way clunkier than this.

Write in Zim, export to html, rsync to site. Easy.

FWIW, I've been using http://zim-wiki.org for YEARS. (Sites a little messy and I need to clean it up, but it's extremely functional,) I host my college classes websites from it, to the point that I forced myself to learn the Canvas API, to just clone the page from this site to the front page of Canvas and change the links so they come back here.

jrm4.com