Show HN: memEx, a personal knowledge base inspired by zettlekasten and org-mode

I still feel like Roam Research did it best. Conor was truly a pioneer in the digital note taking field. I still miss the times when all of it was new, it was so exciting and everything felt revolutionary. A lot of Roam users are still using it even though the pricing hasn't changed a bit and neither has the design, but I don't think there's anything better even now. Zettelkasten is severely underrated and misunderstood. Notion and Evernote are disgusting, and PARA is a nonsensical grift. If you need more context regarding that, I recommend reading Conor's Twitter threads and watching interviews and livestreams featuring him.

What ended up happening with that weird Roam cult stuff? Did Conor finally go fully off the deep end or something?

Tried to figure it out a few months ago and it seems like they just disappeared.

I would be more inclined to use it if there was offline support and it wasn't so expensive. I used (and really really like) Logseq for awhile but have since moved to Obsidian. I'd switch if there was a strong reason to.

I was sure Zettelkasten was going to blow my mind, but it didn't. It seems like a nice way to organize thoughts to write. I'm usually not writing, just trying to externalize my brain. And for that Zettelkasten doesn't seem to offer much over Linking Your Thinking. (TL;DR pervasive wikilinks.)

I bought “How To Write Smart Notes”, but it’s misnamed: it should've been “Why To…”. I hoped it would tell me how to use Zettelkasten, but by the end it seemed to be a long sales manual without a how-to guide.

I was an early adopter and "true believer" (aka paying supporter) of Roam Research, and will always be grateful for the game-changing (for me) paradigm shift it helped bring about in the PKM / note-taking space. I've long since moved on to Obsidian (which has met or exceeded my needs), but credit where it's due, Roam was transformational.

Denote, the org-mode package, takes the cake for me.

(From Protesilaos, whose introduction to emacs was also on the front page at the time of writing this comment)

Why and how did you switch from Logseq to Obsidian?

I'm not the parent commenter, but made a similar transition (years ago at this point). I have always loved outliner formats, but the obsidian ecosystem is quite strong, and because I already had thousands of notes that were just plain old markdown, it was a more natural home.

I wrote code to facilitate the migration. Nothing too crazy, but in general I wrote scripts that:

  - Add lines between logseq's daily notes format and the rest of the content
  - Moving daily notes to month-based subfolders
  - Automatically adding frontmatter to files that didn't have any
  - Removing indentation when unnecessary
  - Covert everything to space-based indentation rather than tabs

It's all cargo cult anyway.

Bugs and performance mostly. The elusive database refactor might bring me back but we'll see.

I definitely have a preference for outliner, flat zk style, but I'm able to get the majority of the benefit from Obsidian while having access to a stronger ecosystem of plugins and first class publishing and syncing support. Meanwhile Logseq seems to have lost a lot of steam.