w2g VS logseq

A friend of Conor White-Sullivan (Roam's creator) propped up his own take on how to do a notetaking system that does support edges, and then he went a step further and opened it for everyone to edit, so it's just a single shared graph:

<https://github.com/w2g/w2g>

Mek works at the Internet Archive, and it clearly follows the same spirit of "we'll operate the service, feel free to bring your own frontend if you don't like ours". I wasn't happy with the way that one at graph.global tries to subvert/duplicate native browser features, so I put up a minimal "client" for browsing existing nodes that feels similar to the default one, sans annoyances on those specific axes:

<https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline>

I never got around to allowing editing, unfortunately. You'll have to use the default frontend for that (annoying, since it's buggy) or write a client of your own.

The key issue I see with the graph.global model is that you have to use triples. I've found that this results in big hurdles for throughput—i.e., the opposite of notational velocity. The ideal thing would probably be to allow a Roam-like system where you can start out by simply linking two related nodes, and then fill the edge details after the fact. You could sort of approximate this with w2g as it stands by just using a generic is-related-to connector and then reify the relation. This does mean you would lose the ability to query by relation unless you add further attributes or went back and edited the original connector to replace it with something more appropriate before reification. Stopping in your tracks to find the appropriate connector is something I found to have lots of overhead.

This is, in theory, what graph.global is supposed to be (by Mek from OpenLibrary / Internet Archive).

<https://github.com/w2g/w2g>

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.