Every time I explore one of these my final impression is essentially trying to re-invent org-mode without emacs.
I understand that emacs is a big ask for someone to learn, but so far none of them can offer a similar experience out of the box.
I understand that emacs is a big ask for someone to learn, but so far none of them can offer a similar experience out of the box.
If I could run Emacs natively on my iPad, I’d be all-in on org-mode. But I can’t, so I’m not.
Developing a PWA for it (basically bikeshedding) is much more painful than learning Emacs. Right now, any vim user can jump into emacs with very little friction -- Doom Emacs comes fully configured with evil-mode ootb, and is easily customizable.
I think the reason for the glut of personal kb apps is the relatively high interest of most "tech" people in these things. Unfortunately, most people bow out of their systems very often -- they either don't handle enough data or they give up on old data (or have it ineffectively categorized).
This app (aka "this week's personal knowledge manager") is the same as every other one out there. There's some trying to use GPT-3, but honestly, I don't want my apps parsed by an internet-slurry model. When (if, really) it gets good enough, one wouldn't need to take notes in the first place.
That take is just... wild.
I've been following this space intently for two decades. The past couple years have seen revolutionary, fantastical advances. Obsidian 1.0 like just came out in September of this year! A huge milestone, but with Logseq chasing them and seeming only a months behind them (and more open source to boot).
Even the slow, web-bound proprietary dinosaurs they are replacing — Notion, Roam, etc — are only a few years old, and in their time (which is now over) those represented huge advances over clunky Evernote, OneNote, and their ilk.
All building on the shoulders of ancient, more limited tools like nvAlt, VoodooPad, Tiddlywiki, etc etc etc.
We're right on the cusp of having a bunch of choices that can help manage all your notes, including your own and your collections of other people's, with images and video and audio and PDF etc, storing it all in non-proprietary open formats, on your own infrastructure (if you want, or cloud if you prefer), with familiar and easy GUI clients for all your devices, that stay synchronized whether you prefer to pay to make that easy or prefer to leverage the open standards and do it all yourself... and we're just getting started with the potential integrations and do-it-yourself add-ons that are enabled by the basis in common/open standards.
I think has been and continues to be one of the most interesting spaces in all of computing. (Sure GPT-3 and friends are interesting, but emerging solutions in this space are also useful, and to a huge number of people to boot.)
My hypothesis is that a more modular approach is the next emergent layer of productivity. A collaborative workflow synced between multiple devices and users in realtime, with an in-app repository for new components and workflow layouts. Think foobar2k but for productivity. Google Apps on crack, where users can modify the application itself in realtime in addition to context.
The problem with other solutions is they solve one thing really well and then rely on a plugin system to fill the gaps. I'd rather see what an approach where each component does something simple but is a greater part of a larger, bespoke workflow. bash-utils for GUI-oriented, networked productivity. Currently, we have to rely on non-realtime, multi-application workflows with rigid, non-transparent data pipelines. Creating a cohesive workflow requires significant specialization, while also locking you in to a specific, non-malleable workflow dictated by app developers.
Hoping it turns out to be a useful paradigm.
GPT-3 et al are a different thing though, and I reckon when they're good enough to be frictionless, the majority of people will stop taking notes altogether. The popularity of this field is solely based on how long it takes for people at OpenAI and others (Stability) to drive down costs to deliver ~1M words/mo to the average customer.
These will all go the way of the phonebook. There'll be "look how my model tears your markdown notes" contests.
Sure, but that isn't the important thing. The organizational structures and theories/philosophies are already mainly "good enough".
The important thing is making that power available in a useful form.
It's the software around them that has never been good enough — not even for just entering the images/data/notes/ideas. And you can't derive any value later from data that wasn't entered in the first place.
> nothing these systems do that couldn't have been replicated 20, 30 years ago
Hard disagree. One of my important use cases is: "paste PNG/JPEG image data from the clipboard, and instantly display it where pasted — while, behind the scenes converting that to an image file on disk and the (open) standard markup to make this data compatible with 1000s of other tools — and sync all of that to all other devices within a few hundred milliseconds"
You couldn't do that even 5 years ago. With any tool, AFAIK. (And I was looking.)
It's about the software, not the organizational structures.
It is revolutionary in precisely the same way as having good cameras in smartphones is. Many, many people take 1000x more photos today than they did in 2002 — and with good reason! It's super easy. And it's now easy — as opposed to basically impossible — to make use of them later. Can't remember where you bought that thingamajing? Just search for the snapshot of the receipt you took 4 years ago on your phone.
This generation of tools is bringing this kind of organizational power to people who have never had it before — not because they technically could't have used the older, more cumbersome, slower, less capable system — but just because they don't need it badly enough to make the investment of doing that.
Making it easier — lower friction to adopt, easier to derive the benefits from — is almost the entire point.
They're mediocre at best
I don't have an opinion on collaboration, because collaborating without proper organization is like running away from the problem. With proper organization, collaboration is easy.
I’m doing the same thing I complain about the “emacs is enough, we’ve had this for 30 years” commenters doing... conflating “good enough for me and my nerd friends” with “good enough for anybody” :-P
What I meant was that we finally have cheap/free GUI tools to do the same things, based on open standards with no data lock in.
From that standpoint, proprietary closed systems where your data is trapped, like Notion and Roam, should go extinct.
BUT it is definitely arguable that Notion is still easier and more approachable than Obsidian, and certainly LogSeq.
From that standpoint Notion is still a better tool for a large number of people.
I know dozens of people who use Emacs and dozens of people who have well-organized knowledge bases and while a few people have both that's about what I might expect based on random chance.
Is that offensive to you?
I did emacs org-mode for over a year and ended up abandoning it. For me, the issue was: I could absolutely see how powerful it could get, but not only was the learning curve wildly steep -- the way it does things is so different from most other programs that it would slow me down in those.
I ended up falling back to a mix of things like zim-wiki, xbindkeys and a bunch of zenity/fzf based shell scripts to get what I wanted, while having something that played nice with everything else, interface wise.
Asking someone to fiddle with lisp in order to have org’s functionality is a LOT. I feel like WAY more people would benefit from org if they didn’t have to use emacs to do it.
I'd absolutely love to see more of this. Hate emacs but after picking up orgzly I'm addicted to orgmode.
Plus, there's no way any org features other than the baseline few are supported.
Wouldn't be surprised if this was already posted on the mailing lists as a POC or something.
Also one thing i like about these alternate options is they work on my phone. I regularly use Obsidian on my phone to lookup information, jot things down, etc.
With that said i'm still looking (making.. maybe?) my perfect solution which is mostly just Selfhosted + Notes + Spaced Rep in the right UX.
And if that works for you, great!
But, I'd wager that Silver Bullet (or Obsidian, Logseq, etc) is a far better tool for 95% of people (for the purpose of organizing ones class notes, book reviews, recipes, first drafts of articles/papers, self-directed learning, personal notes of meetings, diaries and journals, etm).
Cross-platform (including phone) is probably a must-have for many. Immediate ease of use and lack of time spent not only learning, but configuring, is also important. A GUI following normal-people expected conventions, likewise.
The overwhelming majority of people aren't programmers, and will never use emacs for anything. What emacs is good at is not what they need.
It makes me think that if Emacs had a mode that was usable by novices out of the box and retained the same power it would take over the world.
I use a very basic emacs config. Emacs, org-roam, evil, evil-org, ivy, and which key. The most common way I do stuff is still M-x org-roam-find-node.
The only time investment was learning the readline keybinds and doing the emacs tutorial.
I do most of my coding in jetbrains with vim keys, and emacs is just a personal knowledge manager for me