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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Gotta get in the greatest (IMHO of course.)

I'm continually baffled at how the rest of the world hasn't discovered this, but it could be because I sort of live at the margins of "ultra geek" and "normie."

Local, self-hosted "wiki-like" tool. You write notes, it saves them, supports links and todos and calendars etc. Tons of plugins for math, git, etc etc.

The killer aspect, I think, though. Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately and it's very useful. But because it saves as plain-text (Markdown-ish) with links and pages equalling files and folders, it's always infinitely extensible with Bash or other scripts. For me, it's all the extensibility of org-mode without, I mean, you know.

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Have you tried TiddlyWiki [0] which is running the brainfck.org Zettelkasten mentioned in the article. Seems like a very similar concept.

I am intrigued by the concept and thinking about trying it out, so any input on picking one or the other would be great.

[0]: https://tiddlywiki.com/

I've been using Tiddly Wiki for years, and can very much recommend it.

To start, all you need is a template HTML file. No installation, no nothing - it's self-hosted within the HTML! You save changes by clicking the "Save" button, which generates an HTML with changes.

If you really want, you can install a Node.js version which saves changes automatically. But you don't need it to start.

I mostly use Tiddly Wiki to keep notes at work, but I also built this with it: http://romankogan.net/adhd/

I started using TiddlyWiki many years ago and loved the idea, until browsers started cracking down on webpages saving files. Has that changed significantly, or do you still need some hack to work around it?

IMO you'll want to either run a local webserver or set up the Github/Gitlab saver. The other solutions are clumsy.

The other solutions don't require an install though, and are thus super portable :)

I never ran into an issue of needing a hack to save a file. It works just as downloading any file would.

What was the issue that you ran into?

Thanks. Spent half an hour playing around with it, and must admit that it seems magical.

Implementation aside, the whole idea of splitting information into minimal parts _and then displaying your whole route_ on one page is a stroke of genius.

The hardest part coming from the outside is grokking where the state (/database) lives: I soon found out that you could save everything in a new .html-file, and also got github sync to work, but I missed the option to use a local node-install. This is something I need to look into before comitting, as much of my workflow is centered around scripts modifying notes.

I started with a single .html file, and then moved to Node.js. You don't need to look much into it, since you can import data from the .html file.

The only hiccup I've had so far was that I could reference images in the same folder with an [img[relative-path-to-file.jpg]] syntax from the HTML file, but not from the Node.JS version (you need to "import" images first). Wasn't a big deal for me, since I just had to manually update an image or two. Most of my notes in that wiki were just text.

I have. And where it just didn't do it for me is how everything's locked up in that file. Again, the killer part for me is that I can use basic Linux file tools on it easily; e.g. I can either use the internal search, which is good, but also grep.

I've tried many alternatives, but I end up going back to Zim. I've been using it for a decade now with Dropbox/GDrive sync.

I wish it had a mobile version and a better markdown editor like https://typora.io/

Yes. It's insane how many approaches I tried for note keeping. Zim is almost my favorite. Needs a mobile client though :(

Yup. Absolutely the biggest thing that its missing.

I migrated to ZIM from OneNote desktop. OneNote Desktop was everything I needed. Did not migrate to the OneNote cloud thing. Nowadays it's ZIM wiki using SVN as a backend. Not missing out on anything in particular. Ok, the table plugin for ZIM is still lacking IMHO.

OneNote allows hand written notes, that I use every time. Does ZIM or another note taking app for Linux allow hand notes?

None that I found :( You can in theory use inkscape for sketching and then put the resulting SVG into Zim or any note taking app that allows embedding SVGs, but that's the best it gets from what I could find.

Zim wiki is awesome. You could even make it cloud synced by just having it save to your cloud storage folder. The only missing link is mobile support

ZimWiki was my favorite until I had mysterious performance issues on macos, so now I'm back to looking at browser-based solutions, ugh.

Try TiddlyWiki! It's what the author of the article uses and recommends in the article :)

Yeah zimwiki seems to run on macos only by chance and not because anyone tested it or put any work in to it. I love using it on linux but when I tried out MacOS I had to use notes.

> Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately

Is this necessary? Would it be acceptable to say "Any hypothetical <person of a certain ethnicity> can open it up and use it immediately"?

No, it wouldn't be, but that's because it's literally an entirely different idea.

You're looking for offense or problematic language where none exists.

I kind of see what you're saying, usually I say grandpa. But overall, no, I don't think it's a big enough deal to worry about.

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