Knowledge Management Systems

Every now and then there is a discussion on /g/ or /sci/ about note taking, notes, second brain or knowledge management systems (KMS). Latest thread is the start of this page. This page is meant to collect useful information and make sure future discussion keep progressing rather than noodling around in small circles. People talk a lot about KMS but usually it is too abstract stuff and colorful presentations with fashionable drop shadows, and when everything has been said and done, too much has been said and nothing has been done. That is why we are here. Also see this older note.

What

KMS is simply about collecting information so that you can easily retrieve it and also share it with other people. This sounds simple, and yellow post-its abound. The problem comes when you want to retrieve information and yellow notes do not scale. Instead you end up with the "sunflower syndrome" - yellow paper bits surround your monitor until it looks like a deranged sunflower. To retrieve information you need keywords, title, abstract, categories, and complexities quickly increases.

Common Features

Most offer one or more features along

• Simple markup such as Wiki or Markdown, typically bold, italics, strike through, underlining
• Notes
• Outliners
• Todo-lists
• Meta data such as title, keywords, abstract, name and date of creation, name and date of editing etc.
• Searching based on contents, metadata and folder
• Linking to other pages
• Importing contents such as images and documents
• Annotations

Software

Server

Notes

DailyTxT - Diary web application. Joplin Standard Notes

Wikis

BookStack Documize DokuWiki Gollum - Git powered Wiki

Diagrams

Draw.io

Console

Org-Mode - A Emacs mode for note-taking VimWiki - A vim plugin for making personal wikis. Works somewhat with Neovim but not well supported. Dnote - A power user command line note taking app.