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notenote.link
A Jekyll digital garden template, optimized for integration with Obsidian. It aims to enhance discoverability and help you build a personal knowledge base that can scale with time.
I felt/feel the same way, which kept me from using Foam for a very long time.
That being said, I've now used nearly everything (TiddlyWiki, Obsidian, even Emacs with Org-Roam) and have recently transitioned to Foam. Foam, for me, is the best option I've used.
A couple of reasons:
- Setup and maintenance are effectively nil, and customizing it is extremely easy. This was the big drawback of org-roam for me. It seems extremely powerful, but even after initial setup, it was just a headache to keep it maintained (and this is not me simply hating products that require config. I'm not particulary sensitive to upkeep--I'm typing this on a Surface Pro 3 running Linux, I'm used to needing to fix things.)
- Graph view/general UI. A big feature for me is the graph view, similar to Roam, and the associated UI (autogenerated backlinks, etc.). Foam is fantastic here. The general note taking experience is much better than TiddlyWiki (which I think is a fantastic tool as well) and I have to think less about constructing a knowledge graph, it just happens. Also, due to the VS Code ecosystem, there are a ton of nice extensions available for diagramming, embedding images, writing in LaTeX, etc. that make note taking nice without introducing overhead.
- Privacy/open source. This is perhaps counter-intuitive, but Foam has been one of the better options on this front. It's all markdown/text/html, as you say, but it's also fully open source, unlike something like Obsidian (which has a fantastic out-of-the-box writing experience, btw). I run Foam on VSCodium, a community-driven project that rebuilds VS Code into freely-licensed binaries with all of MS's telemetry turned off. The Foam maintainers have been open and encouraging about making sure Foam works in VSCodium ecosystem: https://github.com/foambubble/foam/issues/26
My whole setup now is more or less run out of Foam. I push up notes to a Git repo, which triggers a deploy of a little web app I have that renders a site built out of my notes, allowing me to do things like view my todo's or access information from my phone/other devices. It's been really easy to set up and maintain, and the Foam community has consistently impressed me.
Foam is a great FOSS clone of Roam. Both are well worth trying if you tend to write text files such as in markdown, and you like to link among the text by using relationships, tags, and more.
Foam uses VS Code. If you use emacs, the approximately equivalent tool is org-roam for emacs org mode: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
I would love to see a combination of Foam's exc and emacs org mode.
What's especially interesting (to me) is building this kind of tool atop VS Code, rather than Emacs, Eclipse,
Interesting, I just realized I should market my project as a personal knowledge management system as well. Thanks a bunch!
I just recently started trying to get my note-taking together and build my own personal knowledge base (or at least stop trying to remember everything and instead store it somewhere to refer back to).
After trying a handful of the usually mentioned tools, I've been very happy with Trilium Notes [1], which seems to share some of the same concepts as this project, but providing rich-text (including embedded images).
As much as I like the flexibility that flat files, markdown, or Org-mode provide, I also really like the extra built-in functionality that comes along with Trilium.
I'm not wild about having the data tied into a single program, but the data is at least accessible and documented (if primarily through the open source code), so I know my data's not entirely locked up.
Trilium says macOS isn't supported as the author doesn't have a Mac, but it works 95% like you'd expect with a few small quirks.
https://github.com/treenotation/random-demos/blob/main/Scree...
Lots of things that are muscle memory to Excel users (drag to fill, copy/paste blocks, move columns and rows, et cetera), would be very ugly/hard to do if we were using paren based S-Expression notation.
When you have a family. A wife who barely knows how to create bookmarks in a browser and kids who only use their phone you need something extremely simple.
So you need to " scale " from 1 person to a household and take into account that all information you put in there, financials, recipes, addresses, etc. etc.. need to be ubersimple, working on a phone, auto sync etc... and need to continue working even when something would happens to yourself.
So that is why i standardized the knowledge management system in our household on OneNote (2016 client for the laptop).
This is because everyone understands office.
The API both the COM and the graph API also lets you create , update, read, etc... so you can write basically everything you can think of e.g. auto put bank transaction on the correct place in the correct table in the correct place in the taxonomy.
Thinking about the structure of a family and everything in there is also interesting and I had some larger revisions on that.
See also: https://github.com/projectje/OneNoteExporterAkaPublisher
My base has somewhere around 200k lines of text. I'm pretty sure some of these are almost never read. But I do open old entries/pages some times. I see no problem in writing a note that I never read. The writing is itself useful, in fact, as it helps me learn and organize information.
(FYI: I use a personal wiki based on Vim (with wiki.vim [0]) and a markdown flavor.)
Fully agree. What about Gollum Wiki[1] ? I have been using it happily for years. It used to be Github wikis, but they diverged apparently. It uses git as backend. You're in full control of your data. Love it.
I customized a jekyll template[1] to publish my Obsidian knowledge base and increase the discoverability of notes, which could be better in the app. Also, I wasn't comfortable being tied to the "publish" feature that is still in development.
I use it daily[2].
[1] notenote.link template : https://github.com/Maxence-L/notenote.link