TheBrain vs Evernote vs Personal Wiki

Posted by SmallDog
Oct 4, 2018 at 05:51 AM

Although I’m an avid TheBrain user, I’m starting to look into two alternative possibilities.

Both methods are somewhat hacky, and during the initial stages I expect I will at some point feel like I’m sinking too much time into tools and not enough time actually producing stuff, but I suspect in the long run the flexibility it offers could be worth it.

The first is to keep all my notes etc in an existing programming language, say javascript, and piggyback on the tools offered by IDEs. Just to mention one example, one thing you can do by way of simulating a wiki, is to put the content of a wiki article in the body of a ‘function’, which will be given a name. Then this function will be referenced (‘called’) elsewhere, and typical IDEs offer Intellisense features that will allow you to jump from function calls to function definitions, and from funcion definitions to all the places where it’s called/referenced. Boom! You have cross-linking/backlinking for free. (And of course function bodies needn’t just contain plain text, but can contain links (function calls) to other functions as well)

There’s a lot to be done to fully flesh out this idea, of course. (For example, you may want to make a lot of changes to the syntax files, so e.g. the notes you write in the function body don’t get flagged as illegal syntax. But then, since we’re not really going to run/compile this thing, it probably doesn’t matter)

Another idea I’m very interested in is just to keep all my notes in html, but with custom semantic tags, and a dose of javascript and css for customizing and especially quickly switching between different ways of presenting and visualizing the data. The html can be handcoded (with input tools like emmet to speed things up) or preferably with a good wysiwyg html editor. Wiki functionalities will be achieved via profuse use of regex.

Both approaches rely a lot on search, and I initially resisted how disorganized this approach. But what I gradually realized during my use of TheBrain is that I spent a lot of time organizing even though the organizing itself rarely helps in terms of retrieval - I can always find what I want by recalling some key words and phrases (in fact, I often welcome the pleasant surprises that show up in my search results). All the different options that come with tags, types, and even parent-child relationships start to become more of a time sink, so nowadays I try as much as possible to enforce a “no type, no tags, all connections must be of the jump type” rule. Paradoxical though it may sound I feel the freest when I deprive myself of a certain sort of freedom