How to Take Smart Notes
Note-taking seems to have gained popularity on HackerNews over the past few weeks (or my attention has been biased towards these submissions, at least).<p>I've long been interested in the domain of "personal knowledge
engineering" and this clearly seems a common thread within our
community. As a brief overview of the "SOTA:"<p>* Emacs and Vim users skew towards Org-mode or Vim wiki.<p>* Roam Research is sort of a recent web-based alternative.<p>* There's a lot of competition in the domain of fully-fledged note taking apps. 
  Evernote has long been viewed as a king of note-taking but lost its edge over
  time (bad editor, bugs, lack of attention to their users).
  Memex seems to be gaining popularity even though their
  software looks somewhat buggy at the moment.<p>* Otherwise, people naturally develop their own (similar) systems.
  I myself have independently developed a custom-made Vim wiki before starting
research into this topic.
It basically consists of a few grepping/Vim aliases to search/create Markdown in
a `~/.notes` folder, backed up to GitHub. `mod+-` is bound to an i3 sratchpad
where Vim is constantly open to `~/.notes/index.md`. This drastically reduces
friction when making new notes.<p>In any case, seems interesting that a lot of the personal note-taking systems
have separately adopted similar principles to what Zettelkasten proposes:<p>1. Heavy reliance on tagging<p>2. Some sort of deep linking<p>3. Preference to making small, independent "knowledge chunks"