I’ve noticed that most people - myself included - have fallen into the trap of the Zettelkasten Notes Curse and Knowledge Management Trap system of ideas.
Where we focus more on the system than on actually taking the notes and doing something with them. So i took a step back, after a few years of struggling and trying to have a perfect system, with accepting that I just need a good enough simple system, that’s it.
As I mentioned before I’ve migrated to using hugo static sites and golang as a programming language
I’ve migrated my note taking system from a plethora of systems including Zim Wiki . I even built my own note taking system system with Elixir/LiveView and it was awesome. I’ve tried using vim plugins for this.. Even used usememo an awesome self hosted note system in golang. (Yeah, i tried other systems aswell)
I fundamentally found that I have just a few basic requirements:
- Future proof archiving with no 34d party software required so no vendor lockins
- Simple plaintext format editing in any editor
- History review
- Easy full text search
Everything else was fluff and unnecessary. Really, you don’t need other features! If you interlink your notes you don’t need tags nor fancy visualization of your knowledgebase.
Zim Wiki would answer to this calling for most people. I tried using asciidoctor but eventually jumping from note to note is difficult. I went into feature creep when implementing my own system from zero.
Fossil SCM as a note taking tool?
So i decided to just go ahead and use vim/vs codium, markdown and fossil scm
Fossil to keep track of the history, full text search, future proof archiving , rendering of markdown to HTML automatically. I edit the files in plaintext and then commit the folder to fossil. My fossil is private, but you can easily work with multiple people if needed.
Fossil WIKI alternative
I could have used the fossil wiki, and I encourge anyone to just use the wiki for their note taking system. Heck, you can even have a collaborative system on fossil all by itself.
It can still achieve all of my “requirements” with the built in wiki as I can export/import notes from the wiki as plaintext files..
Plus, appart from what Zim offered, I can edit my notes in the browser anytime, anywhere on a simple VPS.