2/3 of these Perosnal Information Management tools were featured on a recent "my desktop" set up from noted command-line user Hund[1]. Bunch of other great console tools here too, if folks are interested.
Makes me think a bit of one of the original-ganger XML namespaces, pim/space[2]. Spaces for your personal information management. There are very old threads for this, going way back.
I'd say Atom Publishing Protocol came close. We think of Atom as an RSS competitor, but it was part of a broader general information organization & manipulation effort with Atom Publishing Protocol, which included more about ways to manage & append & write information, into feeds, which existed in collections, across workspaces[3].
Tim Berners-Lee is still hard at work, trying to distill out a useful, general means of wrangling one's & other's information. The team seems to have just released Inrupt, their implementation of the Solid specifications for linked data[4]. Which is helping power some of the latest BBC & NHS & NatWest (a bank) systems[5].
Personally I think Personal Information Management is a wonderful white whale for folks to chase. We can land it, & it will make a huge difference to all if we do. As for where we are now, I rather enjoy the JSON-LD & SOLID & Linked-Data world, think there are great specs there, for building better general systems atop, and hope we can start to rebalance some of the questions of control over computing & data with these more general systems.
I've been looking for a kanban tool for which I can own the data (self hosted), and preferably that the data is a human manipulated format (Markdown ideally).
Does anyone know of something like that? I haven't found a satisfactory solution so I've been building one, but I keep feeling like I'm wasting my time and that there must be something else available. In any case I am planning on releasing it as a desktop app and mobile (Android, iOS) at some point. Right now I just use Syncthing to sync across devices - you just point the app to a directory of Markdown files.
I use taskwarrior and time warrior for keeping track of my tasks and the amount of time that I’m doing, and have task warrior set up so that it’s the first thing I see when I log into my home server.
I do use khal and sync it with my google calendar. I haven’t figured out multi-calendar sync just yet (work/personal/wife), but, it’s on my list.
Unrelated ask: Does anyone know of a good way to filter my Outlook 365/IMAP inbox using rules running on my Linux box? I want more complex and easily maintainable rules than what I can get via Outlook.
I've used DavMail[1] to access Office365 for years.
It basically acts as a translation layer between Microsoft protocols and open protocols. I usually run it as a local systemd user service.
My only issue is with MFA. To set it up you'll need to dig through the stdout/logs to get the initial "add app"/Auth URL. After that the push notifications from the Microsoft Authenticator work as expected.
If you're not using push based MFA I'm not sure if it'll work, you might need to dig through the logs to grab the URL each time. If it was me I'd probably setup another script to sit watching the log, extract the MFA URL and send a notification with lib notify.
So yeah, a little janky to set up (yay for proprietary protocols) but you can then use whatever email client you like and manipulate it as you need.
"IMAPFilter is a mail filtering utility. It connects to remote mail
servers using the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), sends
searching queries to the server and processes mailboxes based on the
results. It can be used to delete, copy, move, flag, etc. messages
residing in mailboxes at the same or different mail servers. The 4rev1
and 4 versions of the IMAP protocol are supported."
Two jobs ago, I had written something for this; but it was written at work, so I wasn't able to keep it. Also, it was on premises Exhange, not Microsoft's cloud. But I recall, the exchange IMAP server isn't too horrible, although a bit slow. Perl with one of the CPAN IMAP modules, plus a little bit of caching, and I could do all sorts of filters that couldn't be done in Exchange (like sorting read mail into archive folders).
I have khal (calendar), khard (vcards) and todoman (todo on caldav) installed and use them occasionally. I mostly use my phone and thunderbird to manage contacts and calendars - so they don't find regular use. However, they all are really nice curses/cli tools if you live on the terminal. I don't have any complaints when I do use them. The biggest attraction though is vdirsyncer, a service used to synchronize CalDAV and CardDAV to a directory. Khal and others interface only with this directory and not directly with the server. Vdirsyncer allows you to easily backup and migrate your calendars and contacts between different servers. This is a huge relief if you consider how opaque and locked-in most calendar/contacts services are.
Dealing with Google's version of IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV is with the standard that everyone else follows. Every single program (mbsync, offlineimap, vdirsyncer) needs a special section on how to configure for Google alone. It causes a lot of heartache when you try to migrate.
khal is excellent. I've been using it alongside vdirsyncer for a couple of years now. I recommend aliasing 'khal calendar' to cal - a quick look at your day, and upcoming events.
I also highly recommend khard, which manages contacts.
I second these recommendations. I've been using khal and khard (plus `todoman` for to-do list management). They're all nice tools that work well in my CLI-focused workflow. And `vdirsyncer` is a key component, that syncs to my other computers and phone, via a NextCloud instance.
Contact management (lbdb), numerous task managers, calendars, Emacs org-mode, vimwiki, schedulers, and more.
remind, calendar, and taskwarrior come to mind.