Show HN: memEx, a personal knowledge base inspired by zettlekasten and org-mode

sandreas

[delayed]

null

[deleted]

basedrum

Would be interested to know how this compares to logseq etc

angra_mainyu

I have yet to find a solid obsidian competitor, plugins + git repo really do cover most things.

wrasee

A folder of markdown docs in your favourite text editor, ftw!

+ It’s all within the editor you already know really well. Uses your existing tools.

+ Many editors have really good support for markdown built in. Treat H1’s like notes and along with modern fuzzy search for files/symbols you can easily get to any note and jump around.

+ If you want smarter [[liking]] there’s some good plugins out there to bring this to your editor.

+ Simple, future proof and no lock-in.

I’m currently enjoying markdown-oxide, an LSP for markdown docs. Captures all your notes as symbols so you can fuzzy search and “find references”, etc. supports #tags, too.

sandreas

I currently use flatnotes[1] as a Frontend with a background cronjob to add, commit and push every night.

Works pretty well so far with some acceptable nitpicks. It was a quick and dirty solution to overcome logseq couldn't run in a Server that time... Never needed anything else until now :-)

1: https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes

DonHopkins

I have fallen in love with SVG+text Mermaid diagrams embedded in markdown code blocks, and LLMs are really great at generating them (by reading design documents and source code) and editing them with natural language commands. And they're not inaccessible unsearchable dead-end images you have to laboriously regenerate and check into the repo whenever you want to change something! ;)

Mermaid: Diagramming and charting tool: JavaScript based diagramming and charting tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically.

https://mermaid.js.org/

Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid: A picture tells a thousand words. Now you can quickly create and edit diagrams in markdown using words with Mermaid support in your Markdown files.

https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

Creating diagrams: Create diagrams to convey information through charts and graphs:

https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...

The Official Guide to Mermaid.js:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/The-Official-Guide-to-Mer...

sandreas

Mermaid looks amazing. Did not know gh had support just via

  ```mermaid

  ```

Thanks for mentioning this.

coldblues

I still feel like Roam Research did it best. Conor was truly a pioneer in the digital note taking field. I still miss the times when all of it was new, it was so exciting and everything felt revolutionary. A lot of Roam users are still using it even though the pricing hasn't changed a bit and neither has the design, but I don't think there's anything better even now. Zettelkasten is severely underrated and misunderstood. Notion and Evernote are disgusting, and PARA is a nonsensical grift. If you need more context regarding that, I recommend reading Conor's Twitter threads and watching interviews and livestreams featuring him.

sorcerer-mar

What ended up happening with that weird Roam cult stuff? Did Conor finally go fully off the deep end or something?

Tried to figure it out a few months ago and it seems like they just disappeared.

chrisweekly

I was an early adopter and "true believer" (aka paying supporter) of Roam Research, and will always be grateful for the game-changing (for me) paradigm shift it helped bring about in the PKM / note-taking space. I've long since moved on to Obsidian (which has met or exceeded my needs), but credit where it's due, Roam was transformational.

kstrauser

I was sure Zettelkasten was going to blow my mind, but it didn't. It seems like a nice way to organize thoughts to write. I'm usually not writing, just trying to externalize my brain. And for that Zettelkasten doesn't seem to offer much over Linking Your Thinking. (TL;DR pervasive wikilinks.)

I bought “How To Write Smart Notes”, but it’s misnamed: it should've been “Why To…”. I hoped it would tell me how to use Zettelkasten, but by the end it seemed to be a long sales manual without a how-to guide.

supersrdjan

Denote, the org-mode package, takes the cake for me.

(From Protesilaos, whose introduction to emacs was also on the front page at the time of writing this comment)

packetlost

I would be more inclined to use it if there was offline support and it wasn't so expensive. I used (and really really like) Logseq for awhile but have since moved to Obsidian. I'd switch if there was a strong reason to.

fmos

Why and how did you switch from Logseq to Obsidian?

fredoliveira

I'm not the parent commenter, but made a similar transition (years ago at this point). I have always loved outliner formats, but the obsidian ecosystem is quite strong, and because I already had thousands of notes that were just plain old markdown, it was a more natural home.

I wrote code to facilitate the migration. Nothing too crazy, but in general I wrote scripts that:

  - Add lines between logseq's daily notes format and the rest of the content
  - Moving daily notes to month-based subfolders
  - Automatically adding frontmatter to files that didn't have any
  - Removing indentation when unnecessary
  - Covert everything to space-based indentation rather than tabs

atxtechbro

How would you support someone who wanted to migrate to this and bring all their data with them? Just wondering if you build something like this hoping people start fresh, or do you build tunnels to help people migrate in and out. Kudos.

DannyPage

Found some documentation & sample website that answers a few of my questions, but I’d love to know more about pipelines and how they work with your notes. https://memex.bubbletea.dev/faq

GaltMidas

Was excited to click on it to begin with, but nearly jumped out of my seat when I saw that it was Elixir and LiveView.

trixthethird

How does it compare to org-roam? Seems like colab and web-serving is the main diff?

ThinkBeat

This looks potentially interesting.

How does it scale? Would 200.000 notes be a problem? Does it handle pdf, epub or enex?

and most importantly

Search, what does it have and how good is it? (Is it better than evernote)?

cycomanic

I initially thought it was related to https://memex.garden/ but it seems not.

khaledh

I assume the name is based on Vannevar Bush's Memex¹?

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

bostonvaulter2

The ex suffix could also come from Elixir (its a common pattern in many libraries)

boomskats

I'm guessing it's not my mate DC's old software company¹.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex_Technology_Limited