[emacs-humanities] Simple notes (was: Paper Zettelkasten safety [was: Why Emacs-humanities?])

[Protesilaos Stavrou]

On 2020-12-24, 04:20 +0300, Göktuğ Kayaalp <self@gkayaalp.com> wrote:

> Tangentially, I’m curious about this Zettelkasten thing.  I’ve looked
> into it, quite a bit, but I don’t get the hype.  Isn’t it pretty much
> hypertext with some organisation and automated backlinks?  Does it
> really achieve e.g. anything plain Org + Deft/occur/isearch can’t?  In
> general it feels like a somewhat rigid system with some serious
> technical debt.  Lots of little files, a server, non-Org tags, etc.
> What exactly makes it superior to just putting notes in a couple files,
> and using search and manually linking to stuff?  Backlinks look cool,
> but IDK if they are really that useful as to dictate a whole new note
> taking system and file layout around it.

I assume you are implying org-roam?  Lots of users seem to be getting
value out of it, so it must be doing something right.  And the recent
Emacs conference suggests that there is a growing community around it,
which is always reassuring.

To your point though, I feel plain Emacs with or without Org, can handle
a simple note-taking system just fine.  It is all a matter of committing
to some conventions and then relying on standard tools you already use
like dired, grep (rg, ag...), find-file, your completion framework,
project.el, and so on.

I have been using my own note-taking system for a long time and recently
formalised it as a set of Elisp functions (an excuse to practise some
programming).  It covers my case just fine.  I call it "usls".  The
project is experimental and I am the sole member of its target audience,
but if you are curious try this on the command line:

   git clone https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/usls.git
   cd usls

And consult its README.

-- 
Protesilaos Stavrou
protesilaos.com