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Comment by peterxpark | Hacker News Reader

I've tried a lot of different things over decades. And, after countless experimentation, I'm still at the same place...

I store data all over the place.

I have Evernote for long book notes and tracking financial data.

I'm using notion right now as my base of notes for learning how to build a cabin (toggles and embedding videos is wonderful).

I tried to really use roam and its off-shots for a while but could never really get into it.

And i use a new txt file all the time. Anytime I don't know what I need or going to do. And 90% of the time, I never look at them again but they're all in my one synced folder.

At the end of the day, I keep thinking I'll settle on one solution but I'm doubtful that's ever going to be true.

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> and 90% of the time, I never look at them again

So, you’re a note squirrel. So am I. I’ve stopped caring or stressing out about it. I just accept that I’m never going to be overly organized or systematic.

I do keep all of my notes in a /notes folder or sub folder so that fuzzy find works nicely. That’s the extent of my organization.

I named my folder scribbles. It doubles as a trash bin.

Do you know https://obsidian.md/? It's a note taking app with plugins. There are some for todos and excalidraw for drawing on whiteboards.

I'm a Joplin user but I've been slowly learning Obsidian too. Level1Techs [0] did a fantastic primer on Obsidian and gave a thoughtful reflection on the zettelkastan method [1]. Josh Duffney's youtube channel [2] on Obsidian is also worth the watch too.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H69tRdemJiM

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCV1T7JbfzbE2O7P3kydmKw/vid...

Everyone was talking about Roam for a while, I wonder what happened.

Maybe they all switched to Obsidian or org mode.

Roam costs money; Obsidian is free.

The faithful are still on Roam. Others have moved to:

1. Obsidian: has bidirectional linking and knowledge graphs, is faster and better supported, but doesn't have the outlining structure that Roam is based on.

2. Logseq: basically an open source Roam with 90-95% feature parity and some cool stuff that is its own.

3. Foam/Dendron/Athens etc: Roam clones.

4. Notion/Evernote/something else entirely.

I don't think Dendron is a Roam clone. All notetaking apps of the new generation have certain similarities, but Dendron has a pretty different philosophy for how you should organize your notes.

Roam's about the block within an outline, interlinking and transclusion.

Dendron's core schtick is making traditional hierarchies easier to work with.

Like, with Roam a feelings of power scenario would be queries getting you subtrees from disparate outlines from which you pick out relevant trains of thought to synthesize your own writing, or just an outliner's ease in manipulating your text.

With Dendron it's more like, "oh, I've been thinking about this all wrong" and restructuring your notes so your new hierarchies reflect your new understanding.

Appreciate your input. I'll admit I haven't looked into Dendron as deeply.

Yeah, the app's built around a tree hierarchy like normal folders, but using dot namespacing (music.memes.ohno.rickroll.md) to make working with it more doable than with a file manager. I don't know if it's better, per se, but they have definite philosophy to their design, and it's explicitly against graphs and wikilinks as the be all end all solution to knowledge base organization.

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