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Comment by delaaxe | Hacker News Reader

Please tell me this is compatible with Johnny decimals https://johnnydecimal.com/

I use Johnny Decimal style files & folders with Obsidian and it's great. I wrote about how (and why) I implemented my Johnny Decimal system into Obsidian here, if it helps: https://eleanorkonik.com/yet-another-hot-take-on-folders-ver...

Bloody brilliant! Assigning states is exactly how I use tags too. With tags, I always find that I'm just adding more avenues to be unhappy with imperfection. "Oh, is that the perfect tag? Is that tag too obvious? How will I remember this tag later on?" I would hate to have to develop an entire philosophy of tagging, because I have too many others anyway. So I prefer to deal with the one-stop uneasiness of "is this the right folder for it?". Still not perfect, but just the one.

Thanks for writing that post! I look forward to reading more on your website.

Why have I never heard of this before? And I'd really like to see some example top-level hierarchies.

And I'd ask, still, is is unnecessarily hierarchical? If you only have 10 categories below "20 Finance", why not just stick the (maximum) 10 categories under 20-29 in the top level? You'd still have the conceptual grouping under 2x, but without the indirection.

It does sound very interesting, but designing the system well at the beginning looks quite important (moving categories around later on probably causes large overhead) and difficult to do without experience.

I would also like to see more examples. I'm an academic, if anyone here is also one and has implemented this system I'd be very interested in seeing what your tree looks like!

Not seeing real-life examples is the most frustrating thing about JD in my opinion. Not John Noble's fault of course. In that spirit. My structure is below.

  - 10-19 Documents
    - 11 Scans
    - 12 Health
    - 13 Travel
    - 14 Contracts
    - 15 Home
    - 16 Visas
    - 17 Education
    - 18 Employment
  
 - 20-29 Finance
    - 21 Banks
    - 22 Bills
    - 23 Investments
    - 24 Taxes
  
  - 30-39 Hobbies
    - 31 Hiking
    - 32 Running
    - 33 Climbing
    - 34 Music
    - 35 Programming
    - 36 Yoga

  - 40-49  UNUSED

  - 50-59 Work
    - 51 Archive
    - 52 Work Project 1
    - 53 Work Project 2
    - 54 Literature
    - 55 Code in language 1
    - 56 Code in language 2
    - 57 Publications
    - 58 PPTs
    - 59 Trainings

  - 60-69 UNUSED

  - 70-79 UNUSED

  - 80-89 UNUSED

  - 90-99 Writing
    - 91 Drafts
    - 92 Personal Vault
    - 93 Work Vault
    - 94 Website 1 SSG contents
    - 95 Website 2 SSG contens

I generated this using: https://johnny-decimal-generator.netlify.app/

The Writing bits contain my two obsidian vaults as well as the static site generator contents for two websites I write on. As you can see, pretty much most things of any importance are covered, and yet I've got tonnes of space free to add onto later. Hope HN formats this danged list properly.

I'm far from a strict adherent to it though. Not everything is three levels deep. Some things are much more than that (like the SSG stuff for instance). But this is real life and not an abstraction after all.

I’m really liking the look of this but I’m curious as for what happens if you have more than ten hobbies, for example?

Just do subcategories like the actual Dewey Decimal system

30 Hobbies 31 Solo sports 31.1 Weight Lifting 31.2 Running 32 Team sports 32.1 Football 33...

You get the idea.

Perhaps one of the unused ones will start to get used? Or I might combine a few into Outdoors. To be seen!

Thanks for sharing! I will try this out with work files - personal work files so far. If I like it probably also for personal files. I suspect lots of personal stuff will still be outside the system - like coding projects. I don't like to have coding roots to far away from $HOME

To avoid changing of categories, it's ok to use this without the numbers in the beginning, to allow yourself to change things easily

User of Obsidian here.

I don't see why that would be problematic. You can name each folder/note what ever you want.

I guess you could also write a plugin for Obsidian that would do this for you.

I don't really see the need for numbering though. Obsidian has a very robust system for tagging and linking together notes. Coupled with proper search, I can always find what I need.

I do store my notes in a hierarchical context centric way (Finances > Loans > Calculations) which also helps.

The only thing missing for me in Obsidian is filtering of list of tags it tag pane - when I select one, list should get filtered to show only tags coexisting in notes with selected tag/tags. I write about it too often. Otherwise, it's perfect in searching/accessing notes. I use Obsidian every day and love it.

Sure you can easily implement that in Obsidian. It's simply a traditional file directory structure of markdown files.

I've never heard of Johnny decimals. I'm excited to try it.

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