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Comment by shaggyfrog | Hacker News Reader

Used to use a wiki (MediaWiki) to track source material for a book with another collaborator. Worked mostly fine, except for when the DB crashed. I remember that it was hard to extract data out of it.

Mainly I've kept most of my programming notes, records, todos, research and so on in flat text files. They are easy to view, edit, backup, exchange, copy from, and version. For my use cases, I find it a more appealing technical solution to a wiki, which requires infrastructure to back it.

If someone could come up with a git/wiki hybrid, that would be interesting.

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Just to recommend something that people swear by, but I'm just getting around to trying out - orgmode on emacs (orgmode.org). Super-sophisticated organizer using text files. Source control can be used so you can get to the current version of the files wherever you are, and it has HTML export.

It also has LaTeX export, and spreadsheets, and lots of other stuff.

I've been getting good use out of org mode this last year.

to be fair, the whole point about Tiddlywiki (the subject of this article) is that it doesn't require any infrastructure to back it.

DokuWiki is a nice compromise between the two. Instead of using a database it is backed by human-readable flat files. It'll run on a basic shared hosting account (or your home machine) without any setup other than dropping the files into a web accessible directory. Benefit over pure flat file is some basic formatting and links between pages.

I also use a dokuwiki installation. It has lots of plugins like rendering to openoffice, pdf, presentation (s5 system). It has access control lists, code formatting, a hierarchical document system, it is very intuitive to use also.

It needs php but no database.

Gollum[1] is really nice for that. It power's GitHub's wiki feature. All pages are in Git, and it supports several markup languages including MediaWiki but also Markdown, Textile, etc. Nice, clean interface, nice editing toolbar. Open source. Just clone the git repository where your pages are and run the "gollum" command to start up the server.

1: https://github.com/github/gollum

I have quite some math in my notes and like Gollum also for its integration with MathJax. I prefer the txt-based approach but a lot of math is more digestible when typeset properly so I switch between the txt and browser view. (This is of course applicable to any txt-to-html based approach)

I've played around a bit with sputnik and its Git plugin a bit. It requires a webserver and a bit of configuration, but it stores its stuff in straight markdown.

http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/

I put my TiddlyWiki files in a DropBox folder. I think something as heavyweight as git backend would be overkill for such a simple task.

Heavyweight git backend? Care to expand on that?

You have to add, commit and possibly merge just to add today's agenda or fix a simple typo. Compare that to how easy wikimedia is.

I think I misinterpreted the parent, none the less. https://github.com/github/gollum

I don't understand how git is a backend at all; I can manipulate all of the data (text files) without needing git at all. Compare with a wiki, which requires some sort of backend to work with any of its data.

When I use git in this sense, I'm talking mostly about version control and backup.

http://gitit.net/ might be exactly what you're looking for. It's a wiki that uses git for history.

Or Darcs or Mercurial. (I use Darcs.)

Depending on your text editor of choice, vimwiki (https://code.google.com/p/vimwiki/) could be what you're looking for. It stores all data in plain text files which can easily be versioned in your VCS of choice and/or stored in a Dropbox folder. I've been using it for a while now, works like a charm.

You can use a plain-text format like org-mode, and commit using git, although for something like that I just use dropbox and trust its syncing.

I'm not convinced I would benefit from the full hyperlinked format a wiki would provide, since it would require a concerted effort to organize things well. I usually just throw crap into text files and use grep to find stuff later.

Yup, the text files are in a folder in dropbox when they are not associated with other data directly.

http://onethingwell.org/post/457674798/a-poor-mans-notationa...

I'm using a slightly hacked version of this on the main PC

http://gitit.net/ uses git as the backend, though you still do your editing in the browser. I don't know if it is possible to edit the files directly, though.

It is. You can also pull and push to a remote repo just like any other git project.

You prefer text files to - a text file with the extension .html?

There should be no infrastructure requirements as far as I can tell (just downloaded it, gave it a spin). It's a single file, just like your current stuff. Granted, I don't know about the possibilities to recover data in cause of trouble yet, but you need nothing but a browser and can share/sync it just like your current system.

>If someone could come up with a git/wiki hybrid, that would be interesting.

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,....

check out gitit, its a wiki tool that lets you version back stuff with any of git, darcs, or mercurial http://gitit.net/

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