Personal knowledge base
Keeping notes is a worthwhile endeavour.
The most effective approach I have found is to keep a single .txt file that you can quickly open using a keybinding.
In that file you dump any new information that you think there is a remote possibility that you may need to look this up again.
That could be:
- a snippet of a chat conversation where you asked someone how to do something and they explained it to you
- a command you ran where you did something slightly complicated, with example output
- basic instructions on how bash variable substiution works
- something funny - can give you a chuckle years later when you stumble upon it again
- code snippets
I would separate notes with a line consisting of a repeating characters like dashes, asterisks or equal signs.
Adding a title, "tags" or phrases can make it easier to find what you want.
The benefit of having it all in a single text file is that everything is in one place and you can just do a Ctrl+f to search for something.
Use whatever text editor you are most comfortable with.
Personally I ended up using kwrite, in particular because:
- it is relatively lightweight
- you can customise the theme just the way you like it and
- you have the option to remove all menus, toolbars, statusbar, etc. so that you can view the document and nothing but the document
Example showing what it may look like:
Now, notes is a rather broad subject. Importantly there are many different categories of notes depending on a range of things.
Two key factors are:
- who the target audience is and
- what level of quality the notes have
What I have described above I would classify as low quality notes where the target audience is yourself. The quality is low because it is mostly throwaway snippets of information 98% of which you will never actually refer to again (although the 2% is something you end up looking up several times).
The target audience is yourself because there is little to no contextual information, which means that it would be even less useful for someone else to go through.
This is not bad. The aim in any case is that you can search through this file for examples when you get this feeling that you have done something similar before.
That said, I do also find the need to keep medium and high quality notes. The target audience is again myself, but if I can write them in a way that I can share them with others then that is of course a win.
The tool that I have settled on for now is Obsidian. It is proprietary software, but the notes are written in Markdown which means migrating to something else shouldn't be that much of an issue.
The main appeal of Obsidian is the dynamic and seamless rendering vs editing presentation. In practice this means that the page is rendered in realtime and only the Markdown block under the cursor is being edited. This is opposed to most other solutions where you write the Markdown code in one pane and you have an additional preview pane to see what it looks like.
It also has a fairly good tagging system allowing for tags to be grouped under subsections.
Such notes may have individual commands as in the below picture, but it could also be lookup tables or more elaborate documentation.
A vault in Obsidian is a collection of (Markdown) notes. You may think of it as project or repository if you wish.
What you can do, if you are such inclined, is to clone the dusk wiki and open that as vault. That way you can have a different way of traversing all this information.
Besides all the built-in features Obsidian also has a massive library of community plugins.
Just my 2c but I think that it is worth checking out if you haven't already done so.
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