What OSS tools do you use for personal knowledge & task management?

makeasnek@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 143 points –

I've been looking into all sorts of them recently: logseq, appflowy, vikunja, etc. What tools do you use? Why? What problems did you run into with the previous set of tools you used for this job?

Right now I'm primarily interested in finding a "zero-knowledge" (cloud provider doesn't have access to my data) system for task management. Needs to be able to have recurring tasks and tasks organized in some interesting/useful ways (by projects/labels/something, maybe a kanban and table view). Deadlines and time tracking/planning interesting but not required.

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I'm curious why markdown works better for you?

I just switched to denote - liking the simple elegance.

I stopped using the task management features of Org mode and I wanted to use Apache mod_markdown to view my notes when on a mobile device. I like how simple markdown is. It's all I need for notes. Denote is great for keeping organized.

Not who you asked but I'm a big fan of markdown because it lets me create notes that are:

  • Fast
  • Useful
  • Pretty

Usually you can only pick two of these things in a paper notebook or other file types. I personally use Obsidian right now, which allows me to create notes even faster with hotkeys and JavaScript templates, but any markdown editor with a preview mode is plenty

I would ascribe the same virtues to org mode, but to give one answer to my own question, markdown is entirely editor independent which is generally a plus, though least so for personal notes where org can export to many formats (including markdown).

With org and Emacs there are other benefits like integrated personal to-do and agenda management which is why I have favored it over markdown. But even though I'm a committed Emacs user, being primarily an Emacs format is a philosophical negative if not a practical one for me in this case.

Obsidian thankfully has many of the same features that you're describing, albeit some of them rely on community plugins. The cross platform accessibility of markdown is definitely the biggest factor for a lot of people - but for me, the fact that I can instantly make an aesthetically pleasing note; one that is not just easy to read and gather information from but is also nice to look at: is the biggest plus. Other editors have plenty of templates and most people probably don't care about how their notes look as long as it's notes, but I love the look and feel of a good markdown note