Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I use roamlikes as a combined bookmark / note-taking system.

I tend to spend a few minutes every day taking some interesting links from HN or elsewhere (that I may or may not read that day) and creating entries for them in my personal wiki system.

(This is how I keep track of collections of related links -- for my post above, I just searched for [[knowledge-graph]] tags in my wiki system and copied the results into an HN comment)

I find this most useful for topics that I know I'd like to explore in the future, but just don't have time for right now. The Google search signal-to-noise ratio has lessened so much that I know I'll never be able to find a specific link again unless I remember the exact title, so it's useful to have a way to quickly assign tags to a URL and forget about it until later. Tagging systems are much better than a hierarchical bookmark system for recall later [1].

Then, when I take the time to read about a certain topic, I start taking notes in the .md file corresponding to the appropriate keyword or citation.

The best part is discovering new connections between topics -- sometimes I'll type a [[keyword]] in my notes, and see that several of my existing notes already link to it.

I'm still learning how to best use a system like this, it does take some effort to maintain. Right now what works for me is really short, concise notes about very specific keywords to start. Then I'll do a "synthesis" pass where I'll summarize the relationships between several keywords all in one document, and then make all the keyword nodes in the graph point to the synthesized document instead.

[1] Nayuki, "Designing Better File Organization around Tags, Not Hierarchies" -- https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...




I use roam myself. Mind sharing the alternative(s) you use and find most useful? Would be interested in learning what roamlikes others prefer and why.


I use my own not-yet-ready-for-release app called Noteworthy [1], but here is a list of some of the roamlikes I find most inspiring:

> Athens Research -- free and open source roam competitor made by someone who failed an interview for a job at roam :) -- https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

> Obsidian -- free but non-open wikilink system based on Markdown files -- https://obsidian.md/

> Foam -- Markdown-based knowledge management system based entirely around VS Code extensions -- https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

> Neuron/Cerveau -- Markdown-based Zettelkasten and static site generator written in Haskell -- https://neuron.zettel.page/

Some other honorable mentions that I can't be bothered to dig up links for: Madoko, RemNote, Notion, TiddlyWiki, Cerveau, Zettlr, Notable

[1] https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy


Awesome, thanks so much!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: