Personal Knowledge Managers

I have a desire to try out one of the many knowledge managers.

Obsidian Roam Notion

to try and organize my notes and todos and my mind in general. I’ve developed a good habit over this past year of journaling. Even before this I’ve kept a “Wiki” or at least repository of data that I sync between my computers with GIT but I have a few issues. This has already been very useful to me and these linking systems seem to be a great enhancement to that.

1. I use emacs on my computer for most of this and its difficult to impossible to run it on a non jail broken IOS device.
2. I’ve been using org mode as such to manage my todos and this format really does not play well with other devices, but works perfectly on my computer.
3. Many of these systems seem to try to lock you in by not using plain files on the file system.
4. I do things like fish and hike that often are not laptop friendly.

In an ideal world, I just would want emacs available on iOS. I use org mode for my todos when I’m at a computer and really all I want is this available on the go. With the configuration available it seems fairly reasonable for me to be able to hack together some binds to allow me to do some short basic editing on my phone. This seems even more reasonable to deal with org-capture and org-agenda which would be 90% of my mobile use cases.

That being said, I think that ship is never going to sail. I fear for the future of computing when simple open utilities are just unavailable on the computer that most people use.

One option would simply be to spend less time away from the home and keyboard but as I age, that seems worse and worse. If I want to continue to age I need to spend time on my body and less of it on my ass at a keyboard.

It seems like the best way to approach this is with Obsidian, it plays nice with plain text and can be made tool agnostic. It avoids lock-in and I have no issues with markdown.

I’d continue to be able to use my same tools on a computer, but I’d gain access on my phone.