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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

He doesn't seem to understand tags and links in evernote. Evernote can absolutely be structured as a flat graph in the way that he describes as a big benefit of Roam.

That said, as a long-term evernote user, I've been wanting to leave for a while and move to an OSS/self-hosted solution. It might be joplin but my few attempts to use it I haven't yet had enough time to evaluate whether it would be a viable long-term solution.

Edit: I'm also seriously considering just using https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim and only doing note-taking on my laptop (not on mobile). It's extremely fast and basically zero friction. This would have a slight downside in that I quite often want to consume notes on the go so I may need to find an option there (eg serve my notes up using a private server or something).

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Problem w evernote is that file is bad unit of organization.

In a meeting with 4 people, discussing three big ideas, related to two projects, what file do you put the note in?

In Roam that's not even a question you have to ask, all info in each paragraph goes to all the right places

This is definitely a problem I run into. I’m having a team meeting about Project X, and someone mentions that a particular task is waiting for something from Project Y.

The only way I’ve found to handle this is manual. Note the dependency in the meeting notes, then process the notes after the meeting creating relevant todos elsewhere. But that’s only maintainable if you don’t have a lot of work on at the same time, or a lot of dependencies - and we find ourselves back at lean.

Too much work is too much work, and no amount of automation is going to fix that. Furthermore, life is messy, and there is no universal way of structuring that mess. The more mess there is, the harder it will be to live with it. So reduce the mess to the point you can live with it, rather than trying to structure it.

I don't use files, I use tags. I have 2 notebooks to differentiate notes that I want synced to my mobile devices, but really that's not needed.

You can tag any note with multiple tags and then use saved filters to always find notes which are in a given tag. All of this used to work a lot better (evernote search has been getting consistently worse) but it still works fine.

You can use multiple tags, but the granularity is still page level. To continue on Conor's example, you'd have, say, a note for your whole meeting, with 3 sections for each agenda point. And you'd have 3 tags.

But then when you want to see information pertaining to a given tag, it means that the content on that meeting note is 66% irrelevant. That doesn't happen in Roam.

But in the current state of the app sharing a note shares your entire DB, its an awesome tool but I'm unable to find a way to create a secondary DB without creating a new account.

https://roamresearch.com/#/secretinvite

Capability is there, but UX sucks for both sharing single pages and creating seperate workspaces.

Been working on both this week.

could you point me to the doco

No I do, they just don't offer this same level of functionality. Try the tagging system in Roam for a few hours and you'll see the difference, Evernote's tag setup is much clunkier and harder to do on-the-fly.

Have you considered vimwiki http://vimwiki.github.io/?

I use it all the time. My vimwiki dir is the main thing that I search using notational-fzf - they work great together.

That looks like an amazing combination. Do you have any other plug-ins that augment vimwiki?

For one, taskwiki, which if you use task means you have a great way to bang a checkbox in a vimwiki file and have that create a task.

MY company uses outlook so I sync the outlook calendar to khal using vdirsyncer. I then can use a (really janky) vimscript function of my own devising to add the calendar and some standard stuff to a "daily note". So I go <leader>ww and it creates a note for the day and adds my calendar and then I use that for all the basic notes for the day.

vimoutliner for when I absolutely want an actual outliner to do some planning. It's not always the right tool, but when it is, it's great, and it integrates perfectly with fzf. The other thing is that because notational-fzf is just doing a fuzzy find over text, I point it at all my sourcecode dirs for immediate jumping to particular files, functions etc in sourcecode.

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