Tools for Thinking
juliendesrosiers.com
juliendesrosiers.com
- All content stored as flat files on your hard drive.
- Organised by correctly named folders.
- Can embed images. Will link or autocopy them to the appropriate folders.
- Is great if you like markdown.
- Dark theme.
- Infinite tab indentation synced in google docs, in google drive, since I already pay for google anyway.
- todo.txtThat sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?
I make a template Google Doc with the margins stripped out that I can copy anytime I need one.
I usually will throw on Dark Reader as well and use a monospace font.
Added benefits:
- Phone editing
- Easily link to other google docs.
- Share them with anyone.
I feel like it should be easy to make Obsidian the content editor for a static site generator like Hugo, but I haven't found a tool for that yet. (Maybe it's so obvious that one isn't needed, but I'm not a dev, just a normie)
That said, if you don’t need special control over your content/presentation, then you could alternatively just pay Obsidian $8 a month for their Publish feature.
Also, the Syncing across devices they provide for $4/m right now is a steal and very effortless.
Of course you can take backups using Git, very easy.
could you (or anybody) elaborate?
what is different between Obsidian's inteded way of writing and Roam Research's??
Obsidian is able to do outlining with some plugins, but is primarily designed for writing notes.
I really far prefer Obsidian. If you want to get a good primer on things, lookup Linking Your Thinking on YouTube.
Definitely liked Obsidian's ecosystem a lot more than Roam's so I'm excited to give it another shot now that my one missing - but needed - feature is now available.
Edit: And one pretty annoying thing - it's built on old-school technology that doesn't even support setting the editor width. That's quite a problem in the era of widescreen monitors.
Which one? Zim or Obsidian?
I never used either, so I'm not sure which one you're referring to regarding this "editor width".
I maintain a small open-source script[^1] to find clusters and orphaned notes in a Zettelkasten, and I find it's a good addition to groom my notes from the terminal.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHmevVAAXtu3_beDLtsTm...
- See/Hear some Japanese words I don't understand
- Search it on goo (Japanese dictionary website)
- Clip it with Markdownload (https://github.com/deathau/markdownload)
- Format it with my plugin
- Read the content, weave the backlinks
Keep doing this then I have the super complicated graph in the plugin demo gif you can see.
For the last little while, I converged on a local optimum in note taking: writing Markdown files with VS Code. VS Code (with the Markdown Preview plugin) lets me type math equations in LaTeX and draw block diagrams using Mermaid notation.
Turns out Obsidian supports Mermaid and LaTeX in Markdown too. And it runs on desktop and mobile devices. And has an elegant folder-based interface.
I’ve struggled with other second brain tools, but Markdown files with LaTeX and Mermaid support somehow just fit the way I think and work —- that is, I like writing lots of prose but still have the occasional need to draw diagrams and to write math, and have the doc transform into something that is aesthetically pleasing.
I think I need to give them some money.
- lack of quick capture from mobile (say when I find a good article and want to quickly create a note with a link + title)
- lack of WYSIWYG while creating a note, something like Typora -- i.e. I don't want to have to have a separate button to click to preview my markdown
But maybe others have hacks/workarounds for these?
And of course: https://dynalist.io
Both are infinitely nested tree editors, that enable you to organize information very conveniently. Great for writing, brainstorming, taking notes.
On iOS I use Editorial (a great text editor) to write down all my notes, and I use #tags to make it easy to search all my notes by topic (like #webdev, #health, #books, and so on).
Also Track and Share is a great habit tracker, and Things 3 is a great todo list manager. The more thoughts I can offload from my brain into the app - the better.
On my laptop I use Emacs org-mode, it's fantastic.
Manage this in git and you are independent of any service, yet with extensive-- perhaps even uncontested --feature-coverage.
It seems to me that the tools for thought community generally rallies around Excel as the best example of a "bicycle for the mind" due to its functional-reactive nature and its programmable core, but I feel like PowerPoint has made an equal contribution to the democratization of "augmenting collective intelligence" due to its affordances around outlining and presentation.
For notes, heirarchical notes and to do lists, I flip around between many tools.. ugh. Often just paper too.
I'd caution you to draw conclusions about academics! One reason we did not actually write the software was because we found academics to be high variance in their preferences.
The few people who used powerpoint for thinking would rather write out 20-30 citations by hand before touching Zotero. Someone else had a setup where one click would send articles from Chrome -> Zotero -> bib export -> Emacs org-mode + org-ref + org-roam
In my experience, this sort of visualization is good for mapping out an actual complex, sequential/staged process (and for that, one would instead use actual dedicated diagram maker apps). But other than that, it seems to be mostly for note-taking app makers to show off to show how cool their app is.
Mind maps help me realize things. I use a conference room whiteboard rather than an app.
Starting with asking a question as the root node like "Goals?" and then putting goals around that, and then from those goals, things I'd need to do to accomplish them. "Obligations?" and writing out various people/places/things I have obligations to, and then next what it means to fulfill those obligations.
Being able to look at it all on the whiteboard and pace around a bit seems to be very useful for me. This type of thing helps me sort things out and frequently I have realizations during it that make things more clear.
I mostly do project planning in outlines, but sometimes I will break out the whiteboard. Sometimes those are mind maps and will make me see missing pieces; frequently, I suppose they're diagrams and may not count.
I think the advantage of the mind map is using it as a tool to explore things I'm not entirely sure about and get more depth on them. Like in my examples, I choose Goals and Obligations as things I had used mind mapping for exploring. Once I have some of them written on the whiteboard, more like items start to come to mind that might not otherwise. I might also be conflating the value of any of the elements of this -- pacing in front of the whiteboard, it being a more physical representation by being big and hand-drawn, that it starts to look a bit like a puzzle. Then it starts to present all of these questions. Like after mapping out what my obligations were, it made sense to ask, "well, why?", and then tie those to core reasons, which started to get into agreements, which then made me think about agreements. Why do we form agreements? In a way, I suppose it's giving me space to go on a somewhat controlled and documented deep dive into my thoughts.
The developers are also clearly careful when adding new features, since they always compose well with existing functionality and create a multiplier effect on productivity.
It was kinda stagnant for years, but in the past year or so there's been a lot of new features.
In think it's a YC company too, so the developers are probably here...
I do use Roam personally, but they were very hamfisted with their monetisation effort early on, which left a bad taste in my my mouth. If I were starting today, I would use Workflowy and be paying them instead. From what I can see, it is the more carefully built product.
Just waiting for it to support reminders, at which point I feel like I could use it for everything.
I still use onenote for mor multiporpose notes, specially when there are photoso involved, but Joplin is still my main note taking tool.
I’ll use it until they kill it. I’ve seen a few good “almost there” replacements, but each have their own quirks.
It's good enough for me. I don't think I've ever used Evernote's advanced features because I'm too lazy to organize things into books. It seems like they have an Evernote Import feature?
I am currently evaluating Joplin as a maybe. It is webshit in an Electron wrapper but I think the only note app that isn’t webshit that I can use to collaborate with my Windows/Android using husband is Microsoft’s; it did a shit job of keeping my formatting last time I tried it, plus I hate the way it wants every note to be a text box floating in an infinite canvas.
I still have to actually check out Joplin’s collaboration, that only seems to work if you’re paying for their sync service instead of using something else.
Joplin also has a plug-in to do what EN couldn’t do in an entire decade: give you a nice diff UI for dealing with conflicting changes.
(My requirements: cross platform collaboration, decent EN import, not be webshit, deal gracefully with notes with PDFs and images in them.)
Evernote for Android has gone from useless to barely usable, on my Xiaomi A3 phone. I guess it will keep improving.
The transition to the new Evernote has been a pain, but things are improving faster than I expected.
If the idea I have took off it would take the information age to new heights, with the next phase being ubiquitous use of brain-computer interfaces.
Imagine how productive we would all be if we never forgot. All ideas, perhaps even a collection representing all of humankind, transcribed to a format that respects our time, and aids further thought.
We can reach in and take the ideas that work from other systems, such as Zettelkasten, Nogutchi Filing System, The Web and any of it's parts (markup, protocols), the study of sciences, humanities etc.
We don't fear to do hard engineering to improve the user experience. We calculate differential equations on most animations in real time to simulate dampened spring movements. This is quite fast. Together with parts of the rendering rewritten into canvas rendering (e.g. links), OrgPad is now a lot faster than before. We have auto-resize and topologically mostly stable auto-layout, we support rich multimedia in OrgPages, images (even with transparency), iframes so you can embed other OrgPages, videos or even e.g. Google Spreadsheets or Calendar in the canvas. You can read an overview directly in OrgPad here: https://orgpad.com/s/VjMKIa7bfnN
And no, OrgPad is not trying to be a graph database more or less like Roam-research or a Zettelkasten clone. It is oriented more towards those, that think visually and want to mirror their brains in a natural way to have an opportunity to step back and look at it.
To be most transparent: You can try OrgPad for free. We will introduce the pricing on 29th of August (in a few days from now) but leave a limited free tier without adds forever. The standard tier will cost ~5 €/ month and include 5 GB of storage and most OrgPad features although limited. The professional tier for ~10 €/month will include all the bells and whistles plus 10 GB of storage and priority support. Until now, we have worked on the product itself - we are not a traditional startup, so we can afford this less traditional approach.
I hope, this will be understood as a frank recommendation for a tool, that might solve the readers problem in a more fitting way.
Syncing which supports more than just a paid service or forces you into a brand name (my own WebDAV works for me). Encryption. Flexibility. Just love it.
What makes this product exceptional is the way it allows to link notes: Deliberately by surrounding words by doulbe brackets or automatically by linking notes that have the same keyword in them.
I started migrating my journal entries (date stamped) and my markdown notes into it, and I start to see connections among the notes that I did not make intentionally.
Slowly I start to come up with more and more categories for note taking that I want to do in Roam: Dream journal, reading notes, articles, research.
Before I was using Bear, Ulysses, Evernote, later I started using Emacs/org, now with a small detour settled with Roam.
I personally prefer vscode-memo to Foam. It doesn't have a graphical view, but there a couple other things it does really well, especially its (optional) support for flattened wikilinks to hierarchically organized notes.
- in front of my computer when I am thinking
- in a meeting
- driving
- walking (grocery store, or to a place etc)
Note that each puts on a constraint, but I want the notes to sync.
When I am driving perhaps I need to speak into something that takes the notes without having to be turned on, hit the I am not driving button, find the app and launch it.
When I am walking, I need to take a note on my mobile and it cannot be a large graphical mind map.
In front of my computer -- this is where 99% of note taking apps shine and what they are made for.
In a meeting, especially in person or zoom, it is almost rude to type. It is perfectly acceptable, and almost polite, to write out notes by hand in a pad (it shows I care and am paying attention). I need to transcribe those notes later on.
The idea note taking system performs and syncs across these contexts well.
I like the idea of Kinopio a lot because I use mindmaps heavily but find the hierarchical structure to be a limitation, this seems more lateral. Only problem is it's hosted, would love something like this in an app, like the aforementioned Joplin.
I think the key for most of these, particularly BATF/BASS is the "always open" part. I've recently started playing around with Obsidian mentioned elsewhere and if you don't have it open at startup it's easy to forget about it. And you need to be pretty diligent at the beginning of adding interesting/educational things to your documents while you're still trying to form the habit.
Having a decent organization system is pretty important too (one of the main failings of BATF/BASS in my experience). If I need to scroll through a bunch of development and business stuff to find that interesting physics article that is suddenly relevant again I'm much less likely to do it than if I have a "physics" document or folder I can see and get to easily.
I use the common folder-of-text-files method (currently with Ulysses, although I've used other apps in the past). Any time I need to write something down, that's where I go first, unless I'm drafting a document that needs to be sent to someone else.
Here is when it gets used most:
- Researching something online
- Preparing for a call or meeting
- Taking notes on a call or meeting
- Random ideas I want to save
- Important information I want to keep (but not so secret that it needs to go in a password manager)
- Outlines of documents I want to write
- Snippets of code I want to save
And I agree with pc86's thoughts on 'decent organization system' and "always open". I am working on getting better at it with pen/paper.
I have a couple of macros set up to put in the current date, and a different color for bullet points that are "done" or not completed yet
This is the only one that works for me, and I've tried Org-mode, evernote, onenote, joplin, notion, etc. It's a combination of no-friction to open (I literally just press alt+~) and opinionless. If I want to paste something in there, I don't have to fiddle with a UI to get it how I want, because the formatting doesn't matter at all.
I want a research tool with the following features:
- Collaborative
- Cloud based with offline mode (changes can be synced back up)
- History
- Separate workspaces/projects
- The repository would be "taggable", meaning that after I set all the notes in a project as "v1" I can interact with the research with that snapshot, further when I create a "v2" I can see everything that has changed since "v1".
- Media files (images) can be added
- The ability to "comment" in a collaborative manner.
- an API to extract the data
- Native apps
- Dead simple end user workflow, (ex, don't have to run git commands)
- Simple user permissions (ex. read only, contributor, admin)(disclaimer: I'm the founder)
Let me write a blog post about it. The author of this article in particular might find it useful. Does anyone do something similar?
fun! InsertDate()
let l:line = getline('.')
let l:date = strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
call setline('.',strpart(l:line,0,col('.')).l:date.strpart(l:line,col('.')))
endfun
inoremap <C-l><C-d> <ESC>:call InsertDate()<CR>Edit: it's obviously the big-ass text file, not a "real" method.
- Automatic hyperlinking – When you mention another page, a link is created on the go
- Aliases – A page can have multiple titles
- Properties – Meta data on page level
Instead of linked notes, you end up with a hierarchy of checklists, and when you go back to it you can easily check what wouldn't work (which grays out the sub-tree), or what's been done, or move around the lists. It works well for me as it means it's all in one note so you get a quick overview of the whole thing.
I haven't liked the note taking tools for learning, so I've been building a prototype to do it better. It's like Roam, but is planned to be crowd sourced and self organizing. https://www.conceptionary.app/
I also have a text file with 'comments from HN' which I revisit randomly and prompts either research or just nice trivia.. so thank y'all ;)
I've found this approach extremely powerful because I no longer need to figure out ahead-of-time where to put todos, ideas, questions, and my self-indulgent philosophical musing: everything that bubbles up to conscious mind is added to one of my memos and then will be filed into other note systems, categorized, and/or elaborated at my convenience in the future. There are quite a few things I've memoed that surprised me when looking back at it later in the day, because I had already forgot.
It makes me wonder how many interesting mental tidbits I've lost over the years before I started capturing/organizing them systematically.
You can achieve a similar workflow in Visual Studio Code with markdown, but it takes a little more work.
I have kind of a home-grown anti-todo list system that is hooked up to my life principles, such that if an "oh, I should do this" idea doesn't actually line up with them, I just don't add it to the list. But that's pretty manual and home-grown.
I don't know, it's just that the "capture every thought" genre of software was attractive in my 20s, but after a point it just gets overwhelming.
Honestly though I just need to modify the tiddler editor a bit to support tab in/out for lists.
[0] Risko EF, Gilbert SJ. Cognitive Offloading. Trends Cogn Sci. 2016 Sep;20(9):676-688. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002. Epub 2016 Aug 16. PMID: 27542527.
Super quick way to jot down notes, search through them, tag them if needed. May be useful :)
- Scapple (by the same folks who make Scrivener): https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview
- Tinderbox: https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
- Devonthink: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink
Great for creating personal wikis.
Backlinks out of the box.
I have a simple script that parses my notes (based on tags), puts them in respective files, and creates a new md file for the day.
I think it's important to have a space where the threshold for what needs to be written down is low and unstructured. Since vim is great at editing text (compared to writing), I use it as a space to dump my thoughts out and organize them in front of my eyes. Works great for me.
If you've always got your mail client open then speed bumps are minimal, and you get optional titles, automatically dated entries, and search for "free".
My primary note taking tool is apple notes, wish it had some additional features but by far my favorite is offline capability.
But it never sticked.