[jll29]

After trying out various ways, online and offline (including studying Luhmann's famous "Zettelkasten" http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/image/ZL1A1001/1/#topDo...), and the one that I stuck with is using plain text files.

One's knowledge is too valuable and important to entrust it to a particular binary format that can soon no longer be read. Plain text is durable, portable, easy to process using UNIX command line tools, it can be full-text indexed with a reasonable overhead. It can be version controlled easier than binary formats or formats with heavy markup.

I often summarize scientific articles, write down new ideas or need to preserve how I did something (run a system, install a tool) for later replay, and plain text is great for that for the most part. Occasionally, I used LaTeX commands e.g. for embedded $ maths $ or #hastags to tie together files by topic for indexing.

Importantly, my workflow is OS independent (I mostly use Linux and occasionally MacOS X/iOS) and editor agnostic (I use Sublime and Emacs).

I would very much like to hear from others how they address their KM needs.

[ImaCake]

Why not use markdown instead instead of .txt? All good editors (including vim etc) have great support for markdown and you get plenty of great simple features without much crap getting in the way.

[throwaway823882]

...you know you don't need an editor with support for Markdown, right? Markdown is a plain text format.

[moasda]

Very interesting, I also tried several approaches and came finally to text files. For me the most important feature are full text search and some kind of formatting, including basic support for images.

As I couldn`t find a good tool I wrote my own Wiki server - 13 years ago and still using it every day: https://moasdawiki.net/

[e19293001]

Since you mentioned emacs. Have you tried org-roam?