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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

I haven't yet really tried to commit to one of these Roam-like tools (is there a word for a note-taking tool where every bullet is a nested note, and they can link to each other?), except for a small demo notebook I made, but I wonder how people feel they mesh with the concept of "evergreen" notes.

I've found from using Evernote for a decade that I've really focussed on making evergreen notes -- notes that I continue adding to over time. I worry that the Roam-like notebooks instead lead you to making a "Personal Wikipedia" of your knowledge, where many notes are just the stub of an article, because it's so easy to do.

I worry that, if I used this, instead of a 2-3 big pages on Topic X, I'd have 50 little notes on Topic X, which, yes, I can find through backlinks, but I would not have felt like I had synthesized.

Thoughts?

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i am using Obsidian to sort of address this problem by tackling it in reverse. my team has a massive project going live and it has to have a knowledge base. we are creating the master in Obsidian, which is just a wrapper around .md files.

the way we are approaching it, which i have adopted for my personal use, is to have a data dictionary file that defines the terms used. that is used as a structural launching point for fleshing out each page precisely once and keeping terminology consistent. then, Obsidian handles the linking between each page when each term appears.

this works really well for documents that don’t absolutely have to be read in a very linear order and users can effectively bounce around to whatever they are interested in. for a published manual, like “how to use postgres” or something, this strategy would not work at all.

> I haven't yet really tried to commit to one of these Roam-like tools (is there a word for a note-taking tool where every bullet is a nested note, and they can link to each other?)

This is not a "Roam-like tool" by that description. Notes are basically markdown. A bullet might contain a link to a different note, or you could link to several in a bullet or paragraph, or you could link to none, but using bullets doesn't implicitly create nested notes any more than it normally creates separate nested documents in Markdown.

The additional logic seems more built around the directory structure than bullets.

> I worry that, if I used this, instead of a 2-3 big pages on Topic X, I'd have 50 little notes on Topic X, which, yes, I can find through backlinks, but I would not have felt like I had synthesized.

I haven't used Dendron, just barely installed it and poked around, but it seems like the combination of markdown documents and a heirarchical organization alongside a link graph makes it more straightforward to maintain large bodies of maintained/synthesized content rather than small bits of linked content that are easy to navigate but hard to pull together (which tools that focus on linking between small documents as the main structure do seem to encourage.)

Dendron encourages you to put all your content into one note and then gives you tooling to slice it into hierarchies once that note is too big. See https://dendron.so/notes/e780000d-c784-4945-8e42-35218a3ecf1...

> is there a word for a note-taking tool where every bullet is a nested note, and they can link to each other?

Org mode works that way, as well as supporting the one-note-per-file paradigm. It's a very flexible tool.

Zettlekasten might be one form of synthesis , mostly through the link structure, and not via a linear article form.

It does take some more work though. So the easy ness is an issue.

Maybe Dynalist is worth a look? Basically an outliner in the Workflowy style but it has linking and backlinking at the node level.

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