Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

  - All content stored as flat files on your hard drive.
  - Organised by correctly named folders.
  - Can embed images. Will link or autocopy them to the appropriate folders.
  - Is great if you like markdown.
  - Dark theme.

  - Infinite tab indentation synced in google docs, in google drive, since I already pay for google anyway.
  - todo.txt

Another good one: https://nulis.io/ (or https://gingkoapp.com/). It's like a mindmap turned sideways, in a more convenient format.

And of course: https://dynalist.io

Both are infinitely nested tree editors, that enable you to organize information very conveniently. Great for writing, brainstorming, taking notes.

On iOS I use Editorial (a great text editor) to write down all my notes, and I use #tags to make it easy to search all my notes by topic (like #webdev, #health, #books, and so on).

Also Track and Share is a great habit tracker, and Things 3 is a great todo list manager. The more thoughts I can offload from my brain into the app - the better.

On my laptop I use Emacs org-mode, it's fantastic.

And for many "big-a* text files" I'd recommend org-mode. It also has its own markup (much more powerful than markdown), and can also do spreadsheets (which I personally use only marginally).

Manage this in git and you are independent of any service, yet with extensive-- perhaps even uncontested --feature-coverage.

The problem with a lot of existing strategies is they are aspirational - rather than realistic: conforming to our limitations. We can only write so much, and remember for so long. Have an idea, write it down, half way through you might have forgotten the original idea or become distracted by something else. I think it's just starting to come to light with the Roam-style tools, that imposing structure from the beginning doesn't work (too aspirational?), so I'd propose that aside from the happy surprises of the Zettelkasten only bound by relationships to other notes, its much more in tune with the way Minds work to have more unstructured notes. Individual islands that relate to others, but not strict hierarchies, or at least let the hierarchies be interchangeable.

This is likely a result of me working in a corporate bureaucracy over the last few years, but I've observed executives using PowerPoint for the purpose of articulating and iterating on their thoughts, and it goes without saying that PowerPoint is ubiquitous (for good or for ill) when it comes to communicating those ideas to a wider audience.

It seems to me that the tools for thought community generally rallies around Excel as the best example of a "bicycle for the mind" due to its functional-reactive nature and its programmable core, but I feel like PowerPoint has made an equal contribution to the democratization of "augmenting collective intelligence" due to its affordances around outlining and presentation.

Does anyone get anything out of mind-map visualizations? Everybody loves to show a screencap of their latest diagram, with all the circles and colorful connector lines, but do they ever actually help anyone realize anything?

In my experience, this sort of visualization is good for mapping out an actual complex, sequential/staged process (and for that, one would instead use actual dedicated diagram maker apps). But other than that, it seems to be mostly for note-taking app makers to show off to show how cool their app is.

Highly recommend Workflowy (https://workflowy.com/). Its core idea is just recursive lists. Everything is a list, and every bullet can be expanded to become a top-level list. I've found this to be the most natural way for me to organize information, and there is a satisfying symmetry to it.

The developers are also clearly careful when adding new features, since they always compose well with existing functionality and create a multiplier effect on productivity.

Can't recomend Joplin enouth. really like the note app. you can use markdown, Latex formulas, great for small notes.

I still use onenote for mor multiporpose notes, specially when there are photoso involved, but Joplin is still my main note taking tool.

I love tools and have tried so many over the past year including these new "hot" ones like Roam and Notion. After all that I have come full circle and reinvested in making Evernote work better for me. It has limitations but has always had a big edge in the capture and storage part of the process. I'm still working on how best to author/render content from my work to the outside world but at least with Evernote I can get things in one place and then add notes, content, analysis where I can find it. I agree with some here that it's still hard to beat pen and paper for really creative stuff - it's so free.

I've had a persistent desire for a knowledge management protocol/service that goes beyond the scope of all the software and strategies discussed on HN regularly. I firmly believe that the needs and barriers are pretty universal between people (not personal preference or individual at all) and that in a way, we are rate-limited without it, bound to arrive at solutions only for them to be lost again. I have a dense page in my Zettelkasten dedicated to the idea, but in summarizing it's meant to provide an interoperable framework that accepts different forms of media (not just text, though it would be central) and facilitates various kinds of analysis and thought, e.g. detecting similarities, duplication, extrapolating etc. I'd imagine a specialized form of distributed version control would be needed, and various platforms and tools to solve the capture and retrieval dilemma, and in particular the problem of persistence and link rot. To be sure all I have is a list of problems and some possible clues for solving, but the most hopeful of those is a distributed service that is widely used but very open. It could consist of some commercialized tools or engines, but the underlying protocol must be open for anyone to use.

If the idea I have took off it would take the information age to new heights, with the next phase being ubiquitous use of brain-computer interfaces.

Imagine how productive we would all be if we never forgot. All ideas, perhaps even a collection representing all of humankind, transcribed to a format that respects our time, and aids further thought.

We can reach in and take the ideas that work from other systems, such as Zettelkasten, Nogutchi Filing System, The Web and any of it's parts (markup, protocols), the study of sciences, humanities etc.

A little different but - whiteboard. Now that I have space I bought a 5x3 whiteboard and hung it on the wall. The contents on it kind of parallel the GTD system but for me it's helpful to have it "in my face" the whole time. Plus ability to think visually and draw out concepts.

A friend of mine today just wrote to me about Kinopio, whether have been bought by some SV firm and it was our new brand. I can assure you, it couldn't be further from the truth - OrgPad.com is in my mind way more advanced and overall better designed tool for both small things and complex thoughts. It is used a lot by anybody from school children to top managers, specialists and academics. What we do much better than most tools in my mind is design of the user experience and simplicity, where we have been inspired by 40 years of research of Zdeněk Hedrlín PhD., Clojure(Script) the programming language we use and Apple when there was still Steve Jobs around.

We don't fear to do hard engineering to improve the user experience. We calculate differential equations on most animations in real time to simulate dampened spring movements. This is quite fast. Together with parts of the rendering rewritten into canvas rendering (e.g. links), OrgPad is now a lot faster than before. We have auto-resize and topologically mostly stable auto-layout, we support rich multimedia in OrgPages, images (even with transparency), iframes so you can embed other OrgPages, videos or even e.g. Google Spreadsheets or Calendar in the canvas. You can read an overview directly in OrgPad here: https://orgpad.com/s/VjMKIa7bfnN

And no, OrgPad is not trying to be a graph database more or less like Roam-research or a Zettelkasten clone. It is oriented more towards those, that think visually and want to mirror their brains in a natural way to have an opportunity to step back and look at it.

To be most transparent: You can try OrgPad for free. We will introduce the pricing on 29th of August (in a few days from now) but leave a limited free tier without adds forever. The standard tier will cost ~5 €/ month and include 5 GB of storage and most OrgPad features although limited. The professional tier for ~10 €/month will include all the bells and whistles plus 10 GB of storage and priority support. Until now, we have worked on the product itself - we are not a traditional startup, so we can afford this less traditional approach.

I hope, this will be understood as a frank recommendation for a tool, that might solve the readers problem in a more fitting way.

So happy to see Joplin on here. I adore it, as it doesn't try to be as big and full-featured as the flavor-of-the-month (currently Obsidian but surely something else come September).

Syncing which supports more than just a paid service or forces you into a brand name (my own WebDAV works for me). Encryption. Flexibility. Just love it.

Roam Research was a game changer for me. - I know it’s expensive, the founder behaves arrogantly, but nontheless: They have created a product that is very unique. Many have imitated it’s feature-set (athens, org-roam, logseq to name a few), but they were first and paved the way.

What makes this product exceptional is the way it allows to link notes: Deliberately by surrounding words by doulbe brackets or automatically by linking notes that have the same keyword in them.

I started migrating my journal entries (date stamped) and my markdown notes into it, and I start to see connections among the notes that I did not make intentionally.

Slowly I start to come up with more and more categories for note taking that I want to do in Roam: Dream journal, reading notes, articles, research.

Before I was using Bear, Ulysses, Evernote, later I started using Emacs/org, now with a small detour settled with Roam.

Here are some note-taking "contexts":

- in front of my computer when I am thinking

- in a meeting

- driving

- walking (grocery store, or to a place etc)

Note that each puts on a constraint, but I want the notes to sync.

When I am driving perhaps I need to speak into something that takes the notes without having to be turned on, hit the I am not driving button, find the app and launch it.

When I am walking, I need to take a note on my mobile and it cannot be a large graphical mind map.

In front of my computer -- this is where 99% of note taking apps shine and what they are made for.

In a meeting, especially in person or zoom, it is almost rude to type. It is perfectly acceptable, and almost polite, to write out notes by hand in a pad (it shows I care and am paying attention). I need to transcribe those notes later on.

The idea note taking system performs and syncs across these contexts well.

A grandfather to this space is Ward Cunningham. His latest work is FederatedWiki, a javascript platform which enables a lot of thinking; with plugins, you can push it in many directions. As a "federated platform" you can work in groups http://fed.wiki.org/view/federated-wiki

Joplin is a nice find. I used to use WikiPad religiously until it seemed to go defunct.

I like the idea of Kinopio a lot because I use mindmaps heavily but find the hierarchical structure to be a limitation, this seems more lateral. Only problem is it's hosted, would love something like this in an app, like the aforementioned Joplin.

How does one stick to any of these systems? I've tried BATF, org-mode, OneNote, and pen/paper. Each of which fail spectacularly due to overload and eventually they just end up being forgotten about long enough to no longer be useful.

Tiddlyroam: https://tiddlyroam.org/

Ok, so this seems like a great thread to ask this question.

I want a research tool with the following features:

  - Collaborative
  - Cloud based with offline mode (changes can be synced back up)
  - History  
  - Separate workspaces/projects
  - The repository would be "taggable", meaning that after I set all the notes in a project as "v1" I can interact with the research with that snapshot, further when I create a "v2" I can see everything that has changed since "v1".  
  - Media files (images) can be added

  - The ability to "comment" in a collaborative manner.  
  - an API to extract the data
  - Native apps
  - Dead simple end user workflow, (ex, don't have to run git commands)
  - Simple user permissions (ex. read only, contributor, admin)

If you fall into the *Big-Ass Text File* approach, I would recommend Dendron.so It's an open source plaintext based note taking tool that runs inside VSCode with the option to add additional structure to your text using schemas (think type system but for your notes)

(disclaimer: I'm the founder)

I too use large files with random notes, but I can't be bothered to write dates -- so I use git and cron to automate a searchable, persistent diary.

Let me write a blog post about it. The author of this article in particular might find it useful. Does anyone do something similar?

I used the "BATF" method for years, with one file per year. In 2014 I switched to Zim [1] and haven't looked back.

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

Saga: https://saga.so

- Automatic hyperlinking – When you mention another page, a link is created on the go

- Aliases – A page can have multiple titles

- Properties – Meta data on page level

Thanks for mentioning Joplin! Personally I don't use it as a Zettelkasten tool, but I tend to use it to throw ideas in lots of checkbox lists and sub-checkbox lists, which I guess is a similar concept.

Instead of linked notes, you end up with a hierarchy of checklists, and when you go back to it you can easily check what wouldn't work (which grays out the sub-tree), or what's been done, or move around the lists. It works well for me as it means it's all in one note so you get a quick overview of the whole thing.

Tools for better thinking

https://untools.co/

There are different types of note taking. For random items, I use lists like Trello. For lots of non-transferrable knowledge, I use a wiki like Notion.

I haven't liked the note taking tools for learning, so I've been building a prototype to do it better. It's like Roam, but is planned to be crowd sourced and self organizing. https://www.conceptionary.app/

I use Notepad++ like the author to keep a big a** text file but split it into separate files per quarter; they typically contain ideas which then make it to Notion if I'm really excited about them. But it's really hard to commit to online tools over simplicity of a git repo full of text files.

I also have a text file with 'comments from HN' which I revisit randomly and prompts either research or just nice trivia.. so thank y'all ;)

Instead of a big-ass text file, I recently started a 3-part memo system: (1) an Olympus VN541-PC voice recorder for thoughts while driving; (2) a pocket memo pad for notes where extra working memory is needed for thinking, like tables or lists; (3) a memo.txt file synced with my primary devices for convenience.

I've found this approach extremely powerful because I no longer need to figure out ahead-of-time where to put todos, ideas, questions, and my self-indulgent philosophical musing: everything that bubbles up to conscious mind is added to one of my memos and then will be filed into other note systems, categorized, and/or elaborated at my convenience in the future. There are quite a few things I've memoed that surprised me when looking back at it later in the day, because I had already forgot.

It makes me wonder how many interesting mental tidbits I've lost over the years before I started capturing/organizing them systematically.

There's an old(ish) tool by the name of NoteLiner, no longer maintained. If you can find a copy which isn't too buggy (3.3 is the best), I've never found a better outlining tool for methodically breaking down a task or concept. In particular, the use of CTRL+Space as a quick way to collapse/expand a tree is really efficient. NoteLiner is also less restrictive than most other outlining applications, as it's more of a blend of a text editor than something that imposes a rigid structure. Best used in conjunction with George Polya's "How to solve it" method :)

You can achieve a similar workflow in Visual Studio Code with markdown, but it takes a little more work.

I see a ton of recommendations that invite you to blurt out all your thoughts and capture them, but after you do that for a while... what tools/processes help you know what you can delete or let go of?

I have kind of a home-grown anti-todo list system that is hooked up to my life principles, such that if an "oh, I should do this" idea doesn't actually line up with them, I just don't add it to the list. But that's pretty manual and home-grown.

I don't know, it's just that the "capture every thought" genre of software was attractive in my 20s, but after a point it just gets overwhelming.

I use TiddlyWiki for structured notes personally, though I haven't yet found a way to do quick outlining with it in a satisfactory way.

Honestly though I just need to modify the tiddler editor a bit to support tab in/out for lists.

“exo-brain (tech-)tools” is a form of cognitive offloading [0], right?

[0] Risko EF, Gilbert SJ. Cognitive Offloading. Trends Cogn Sci. 2016 Sep;20(9):676-688. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002. Epub 2016 Aug 16. PMID: 27542527.

I liked using Cinta Notes - https://cintanotes.com/

Super quick way to jot down notes, search through them, tag them if needed. May be useful :)

Surprised no one mentioned either of

- Scapple (by the same folks who make Scrivener): https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview

- Tinderbox: https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

- Devonthink: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink

I highly recommend TiddlyWiki. The name puts a lot of people off, but it is really great. Supports backlinks and transclusion, among the more typical tagging and linking.

Great for creating personal wikis.

DokuWiki: www.dokuwiki.org

Backlinks out of the box.

I am partial to simple text files that I edit in vim.

I have a simple script that parses my notes (based on tags), puts them in respective files, and creates a new md file for the day.

I think it's important to have a space where the threshold for what needs to be written down is low and unstructured. Since vim is great at editing text (compared to writing), I use it as a space to dump my thoughts out and organize them in front of my eyes. Works great for me.

I love these threads for the tools people mention. These threads are one of the best things about HN.

I'm using Vimwiki for now. I seem to be happiest with notes in vim, but (since I use it in a terminal) I'd still like a way for that particular vim (in terminal) window to stand out. Any ideas? Maybe using an alternative terminal emulator for that one?

I want to try obsidian. I like notion but load times drive me nuts.

My primary note taking tool is apple notes, wish it had some additional features but by far my favorite is offline capability.

Don't forget treesheets https://strlen.com/treesheets/

Getting Things GNOME! https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/GTG

I can't help myself but to write that Chef Kinopio is a yellow Toad who works at the restaurant in Overlook Tower in Paper Mario: The Origami King. :D

https://cmap.ihmc.us/

org-roam should have made the list.