Michel Foucault had this to say to contemporary critics of Hegel:<p>"We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us."<p>It seems any investigation of prior art regarding knowledge base systems comes back to Emacs, where the solution to all problems of note taking and memory retention is patiently waiting for everyone to finally learn Elisp. But Emacs is for dinosaurs, we repeat for the 100th time ...
Does anyone have any research or experience with using "personal" systems like these as a team? I've always seen them described as having a single user, but many of the links seem like they'd be just as powerful for a (maybe small, maybe tightly-knit) team.
Since these systems have been coming up so much on HN, I have to ask: are there any such softwares that play nicely with images, PDFs, and Word/Excel docs? I've been trying out Devon think and it's pretty good, but I'd prefer to support a FOSS option.
I do like org-roam, but wonder if it's over-engineered. The main thing you need is backlinks, and you can get that without all the complexity of an additional package and sqlite dbs.<p><pre><code> (defun buffer-backlinks ()
(interactive)
(rg (buffer-name) "*.org" org-directory))
(add-to-list 'org-mode-hook 'buffer-backlinks)
</code></pre>
Net effect of that tiny elisp snippet is what when I open an org file, I get a buffer beside it (powered by ripgrep/rg) with names + context snippets of all the other files in my org dir that link to it.
I see a screenshot there defines an anki card? Couldn't find any mention about anki in docs or on the github (I only skimmed though). Would be interesting to see if there is a possible interplay.<p>I myself use vanilla org mode for this purpose (spaced repetition). My workflow is the following:<p>1. Create a hierarchical structure with leaves representing
bits of knowledge. For example postgres/indexes{btree, GIN, ...}<p>2. Have a study session with materials (books, video, etc).<p>3. Try to recreate a concise version of each subject and place it under leaves, so put text in btree, GIN, etc. If I cannot do something I skip it and fill as much as possible.<p>4. Verify written, fix if necessary.<p>Then, the document will sit there for a while and when I feel that I need to review a certain subject I would open a tree node and try to recall the child nodes, or sometimes go directly to leaf nodes and try to explain each. Then verify with the data there, maybe do additional research if something isn't clear.<p>I initially wanted to make anki cards for every piece of information that goes to leaf nodes, but it seemed that hierarchical organization suits me better. It would be interesting to try an automatic card system that would keep track of when I reviewed the concepts and remind me to do so.
All the the recent Org Mode content on HN has really gotten me interested. I feel like I’ve tried so many systems over the years (including just using one big text file in Joplin currently) ... this one seems to be very well-liked, but the learning curve, at least for someone who is new to emacs, seems steep. I’ve started by just installing Doom on my clients and am slowly learning my way around.<p>Two questions for those with more experience:
1. Do you think this is a good system for someone NOT actually working in emacs all day long (I’m not a programmer)?
2. I see some mobile apps out there that claim to allow Org Mode use on phones ... is this system of note-taking / task mgmt actually usable on a mobile device?
After seeing the "Zettlekasten" concept trending on HN, I've been wondering when someone might bring up Emacs org-mode, because the promises of both technologies seem to overlap. This seems like a step in that direction.