Heptabase - Crimp cured?

Posted by Tumbleweed
Sep 11, 2023 at 02:43 PM

Hi, so I have/had licenses to many “outliners”, and have tried the following as full-term solutions: KeyNote, Maple Professional, MyBase, EPim, InfoQube, Zoot, OneNote, UltraRecall, RightNote, Watership Planner, doogiePim, emClient, Everdesk, and some combination of those with others.

However, I’ve always had CRIMP, since there are weaknesses in all of these based on my use cases. I used to think this was email handling, but recently I realized that information location and retrieval - and getting an overview of my data - is the chief concern. Information was just piling up and not being useful. Hence, I’ve been exploring the new generation, ie. LogSeq, Capacities, Tana, Heptabase, Obsidian, etc. Since the early days, I’ve always thought something where you could visually see an overview and drill down would be a great idea, but The Brain and mindmapping software wasn’t really fitting my manner.

The winner is Heptabase, and it’s not even close. Now this is of course based on my way of working and what is intuitive to me, but it hits almost every box. The features are so well thought out and integrated, with a small learning curve. It’s really just incredible!

The heart of Heptabase are cards, which are organized via the Map, whiteboards, and sections. Cards can include text, pictures, attachments, code, etc. They are visual and can be linked, resized, etc. Then they can be organized into whiteboards, which may have sections. Whiteboards can contain sections or additional whiteboards, so the layering is up to your imagination and organizational style.

Additional features include: cloud OR local storage only, optional OpenAI integration, Journal, global search, card linking, two-way item links, etc. There is even a built in PDF viewer, so that PDFs can be viewed in the right pane.Speaking of the right pane, if you are viewing a card, you can open the linked card (or the backlink) in the right pane - this allows for incredibly fast access of related knowledge without interruption. It also means that the linking gives a wiki-like potential if Obsidian is more your thing.

There is also a view of Tags, which opens all cards with given tag(s) and allows filtering. Properties are given and these can be added and customized. I cannot overstate how powerful this is, although at first glance it appears to be simple. It can be viewed according to multiple organization levels, and even a Kaban board! You can also view the Map, which overviews your whiteboards and allows for organization of all aspects of your information store.

I am going to use this for basically everything other than email, which I’ll keep in Outlook. But for everything else, I’ll use Heptabase. When I look at my notes, I frequently whiteboard up certain overviews of ie. business and these can actually be reproduced in a vastly superior way in Heptabase. I’ll be using this for all my personal and professional planning, as a knowledge base, to review and organize articles, logging meetings, code snippets, idea dump, project plans and todos, work log, goal setting and review, journal, etc.

My only nitpick is that email as an attachment is not handled well - clicking it prompts a download to your machine instead of just opening it with the default client. However, I contacted them and they are aware people want better email handling. So I expect an update to this soon.

Please check out their examples and docs: https://wiki.heptabase.com/getting-started-with-heptabase as I’m not really doing the software justice with this brief set of impressions. But this has clicked in a way that I didn’t think possible - after 20 years of the ailment, my CRIMP may be cured!

Best, /TW