Search for a second brain
2024-02-24
Tags: SecondBrain
For several years I’ve tried to use various Second Brain- or Zettelkasten-systems.
During University studies I developed a need to organize stuff, somehow. I started using OneNote. I’ve looked for alternatives since, since there are several aspects of OneNote I dislike.
Throughout the years I tried:
… and winded up using both OneNote and zk. OneNote I use at work and zk for everything else.
Then zk got into maintenance mode as of 2024-01-02 (EDIT 2024-08-30: It’s not in maintenance mode any longer!). I really like zk, it’s the best CLI zettelkasten tool I’ve tried. However, it does not generate a graph-view of my notes, where tags, links etc. are visualized.
So I uninstalled zk and looked into Obsidian. It ticked many of my checkboxes:
- Markdown based
- Graph visualization
- Cross-platform
- Link documents with tags
I then wanted to sync ~/.config/obsidian to my personal
.dotfiles-repo. Bad idea. Obsidian contains all kinds of
non-lightweight information in it’s config directory.
I realized a final criteria for my goto-system is that is should be a collection of markdown files, no more, no less and some view into that collection.
foam.foam-vscode
I asked ChatGPT 3.5, because I’m cheap, for some advice. It didn’t
take long until it suggested VSCode plugin foam.foam-vscode
(link). It is
everything I always wanted:
- Markdown based
- Graph visualization
- Cross-platform
- Markdowns can have a tag list in frontmatter
- … and some more features I didn’t know I wanted
It’s a big upside that it’s a VSCode plugin for me since VSCode is still my primary editor (Helix is alluring and I sometimes make excursions over there…).
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Example output from Foam: Show Graph in VSCode. |
All nodes are clickable, and I can highlight over nodes to easily see where they connect. It’s a simple and useful concept.