Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

The note on semantic and operational distinction of notes is interesting. I personally ditched hierarchies when I switched to Org-Roam. I used to think all the time where a specific note would belong - should I organize my notes by dates? Should I use the datetree feature of Org-Mode? Should I put everything in one file or split between multiple files grouping notes by some categories or tags.

These days, the only question I have to ask myself is "in what context do I want to rediscover this note?". For example, I don't usually sit around thinking: "Didn't we discuss this SSH-related problem with Jeffrey and Anna back in May? Let me go to the may-2024 folder of my notes and grep through them...". Instead, I would just go to either of these notes titled: 'ssh' or 'Jeffrey' or 'Anna' and search for backlinks, where I will surely find my notes related to that discussion, even if they're spread out across multiple days and many notes in multiple places. And it doesn't really matter where specific notes are - which file, what nested hierarchy of headings, etc.

Zettelkasten really does work. You just need a quick an easy way of cross-linking different notes. I highly recommend this little book called 'How to Take Smart Notes', it's fairly small, you can go through it within an hour or so. And remember the famous quote of Richard Feynman: "Notes aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process"... If you don't find a good way of taking notes, you won't be doing a good job of thinking.

The point about linting still stands, though. I recently had to grep for a note I was really sure was there, but didn't show in the roam-find- autocomplete. Turns out, at some point I must've accidentally put a stray character that made properties section stop parsing, dropping the note from the system. Another case is when I occasionally add what I intend to be roam note as a new org file, and then forget to press the shortcut I have to give the file an ID.

(EDIT: Similarly, over the years I had a few cases of some TODOs I forgot about because I accidentally made a whole subtree stop parsing with a stray character. Rare as it is, I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't switch to modal editing a la vim, as those mistakes tend to happen when moving through the outline with "speed keys".)

In general, Org works well for me, but damn if the fragility of plaintext doesn't bite me every now and then.

> fragility of plaintext

For that, I have .dir-locals.el file in the root of my notes folder with a single line: ((org-mode . ((eval git-auto-commit-mode 1))))

Even if I accidentally make a change, there's always trackable history

I'm more of a "stick everything in Dropbox/OneNote" kind of person myself, as it gives seamless syncing of my Org files between multiple devices. For various reasons I've been relying on that much less recently, so I'll reconsider the git approach.

Yes, I do the same, I use Resilio. I thought about switching to Syncthing, but my NAS supports Resilio out of the box, so I kept using it. I let my .git folder to be synced between devices and I never actually pushed anything to a "proper" git forge - I can't think of a practical use case for pushing my notes to GitHub/Gitlab.

My git-autocommit technique only for tracking unforeseen changes - I was using Orgzly on Android, and one day I tried using its sync feature and it borked up a bunch of my notes, creating duplicate files, etc. I didn't like that.

> The point about linting still stands, though.

Do you run org-lint on the save hook? I wonder if that'd be too distracting, or if it can be done silently unless some errors detected.

No, but this submission and thread just convinced me to try.

You can use a combination of auto-save-visited-mode (this will save to the actual file, rather than a backup) and gitwatch to auto commit all changes. It should prevent most forms data loss or desynchronization.

Never heard about it. I use nvpy, a simplenote clone.

How can I install org-roam? Looks difficult.

Org-roam is an extension that works on top of Org-mode, and it's very simple to switch to if you already know Org-mode.

Org-mode by itself, if you've never used Emacs before, can certainly be challenging - it has too many features. One of the best overviews of the Org-mode's built-in features is Rainer König's playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVtKhBrRV_ZkPnBtt_TD1... He also has a Udemy course https://www.udemy.com/course/getting-yourself-organized-with..., but I've never tried it myself - by the time he published it, I was already well-versed in Org-mode features.

Besides these, Org-mode is extendable with other packages. I, for example do my pdf-annotations, presentations, anki-card editing, http endpoints testing, dotfile management and many other things in Org-mode.

I have a flat directory of notes that I just grep through. turns out the prefect system I spent my twenties chasing didn't need to exist.

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