| I have started doing something along these lines because I have the habit of dabbling around with new shiny programming languages and libraries. I also consume a lot of information online -- blogs, articles, and ebooks of things that I am interested in. Previous to this, I had a paper based notebook to hold all my thoughts and whatever I learned. The problems that I faced with that setup were: - For offline notes, I lose out the luxury of editing cleanly and indexing. Writing technical notes on paper go out of hand after some time. (I still have a paper based journal and personally find paper to be better in all other respects but I digress). - Because indexing is tough, so is searching. I can make a hundred tags, but if I lose out on giving that page an entry in index then it becomes difficult to find. I have been an Emacs user for some years now and have gradually moved my setup to org-mode[0]. I arrange my thoughts/knowledge across various files and folders, give tags to the data and searching and arranging this has been pretty solid. Searching is just a single command "Ctrl-c p s g" and it greps through all the entries, e.g: https://imgur.com/a/IY0TE3Y Coming to the points that you mentioned, I do the following 1 & 2. Active Engagement & Summary: With a dual monitor setup, Emacs is (almost) always opened. If I come across something, then I quickly open/create the associated file and log my thoughts. This is true when I'm at a computer, both at office and at home. Otherwise, I try to make an entry in some note taking app on my phone (I've been using ColorNote for Android for last 6 years or so, it syncs and backs-up the data). This phone based approach is something I still am not 100% comfortable with, but at least I have some place to dump my ideas. 3. Linking is done by org mode tags[1], and the file/folder structure that I have on disk. For metadata (webpage, context, etc.), we can associated a property drawer with every entry.[2] 4. Contextualization: Maybe a combination of tagging and searching can do that? I'm not an expert with org, but it supports searching tags with boolean operators[3], so that might float your boat. This setup is plain text, and supports encryption via Emacs (and auto backup if you save in Dropbox). I have a private repo at gitlab and push every couple days. [0] https://orgmode.org/ [1] https://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html [2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Drawers.html [3] https://orgmode.org/manual/Matching-tags-and-properties.html... |