I wrote a few days ago about impermanence and how it is, perhaps, desirable for our identities to be at least a bit ephemeral, the better to grow. There’s gray in all that. We should always be clear on who we are, what matters to us, what our values are. But we should also be ready to let bits of our identities go.
I know that is easier said than done.
“Bits of our identities” are conversation starters, signifiers, hints, badges, clues to deeper things about us, personal reminders, and anchors.
“Anchors.”
“That was a very anchoring conversation.”
“This is a real anchor around my neck.”
Which is a weird way to start a post about note-taking apps, but here we are.
Like, Emacs is part of my “Unix person” origin story. I can’t name another software tool I’ve used as consistently for 33 years. I suppose the Unix paradigm itself edges Emacs out for personal longevity, but not by much. And when I think about everything I was doing with that first Ultrix account in 1991, “running Emacs” is the only thing that remains from the list. No more Netrek, I don’t use USENET in a way that would be recognizable to Past Me, and if the work I did on the Landsraad assembly hall for the DUNE MUD remains – getting cones of silence to work felt like a real triumph – I haven’t been around to visit it for a few decades.
It is a bit of an anchor in the putatively good sense of the word “anchor.” Technological comfort food. One of the first things that goes on any new machine, and one of the first server-side things I test when I’m trying out a new remote access tool. But also a bit of an anchor in the not-great sense of the word, in that I will pay the “figure out how to express this in elisp” tax for hours, well beyond practicality or reason.
Most recently, I was ignoring some excellent advice from Prot regarding people who want to use his excellent Denote for task tracking:
“If you want my opinion though, be more forceful with the separation of concerns. Decouple your knowledge base from your ephemeral to-do list: Denote (and others) can be used for the former, while you let standard Org work splendidly for the latter—that is what I do, anyway. … “Do not mix your knowledge base with your to-do items.”
… and the complexity was piling up and up, the tradeoffs were getting worse, and there was simply no joy in the experience because I had gotten myself into that bitter “make this problem yield” mindset that eventually leads to less understanding and more hacked-up, suboptimal stuff.
I just don’t have time for it right now.
So it makes sense that my fallback position was “maybe Logseq would be fine,” because it’s got the whole “supports org-mode syntax” thing going on – leave the door open for a return to Emacsland once I have more time – and perhaps because it is just odd enough to tickle another bit of my self-image. Mercifully, the second I tried to solve a problem of moderate complexity I realized how much time I’d have to invest to do anything besides pick code samples up off the sidewalk and pop them in my mouth. So I backed away slowly.
And after that it makes sense that Tiddlywiki got a look because it has been around forever and there is a sort of cheerfully prosaic attitude among its users. But the plugins started creeping in and I was trying to get it to do stuff it doesn’t really want to do without a lot of third party assistance, so the whole “it’s very simple” thing was not allowed to find much expression.
So there I was, and I’m sort of glad that I chased my tail over the past few weeks because it tired me out a little, but left me with an idea of what I wanted to do: Take notes in a connected manner, blend a little of PARA with space for a slipbox approach, and have inline todos, and I wanted it to sync across a few devices.
Obsidian does all that very well. There is always the risk of plugin creep, but in past Obsidian experiments that has been less about extending the core feature set and more about removing repetitive work. The simple mission of “write notes, link between them, keep track of tasks” doesn’t take much, with mobile and sync managed competently. It runs on every platform I’d care to run it on.
It’s a little dull. But after a few days of “just using it” and adding little affordances here and there from past vaults as I’ve remembered them, it has the benefit of just working in a non-dramatic, non-head-desking, simple way. I haven’t had to really think about it much. I haven’t inadvertently broken it or misconfigured it in such a way that I’m scrambling around a minute before a meeting trying to get back into my own notes. It’s of sufficient maturity that you can look up the answers to things and they are often in written form, which minimizes the whole “if I see one more YouTube poster frame of a slack-jawed influencer taking 30 minutes to explain something I could have copied and pasted in ten seconds I’m going to do a murder” thing.
I was inclined to say “and it says nothing about me, at all.”
But it does say a few things: “Doesn’t want to think about this problem he created for himself in any more detail,” “will settle on Markdown even though it is inferior to org,” “can stand being associated with people who think a graph of their notes is interesting and useful if it means not having to think about this any longer,” “will pay for sync,” “considers seven plugins normal and reasonable, would not admit to nine,” and – most likely and eventually – “always seems to creep back to Emacs even though it seemed like he knew better last time he did this.”