What are some older gems as well as new innovations (preferably with a decent free plan, even if to just try out the concepts), in the area of mostly active studying with sideline abilities such as notetaking, tasks and (recurring) reminders? Some that come to mind are Scrivener for the modular writing capability, but I don't see much use for it beyond what Rightnote can already provide with nested pages, nav pane and ability to export any selection of notes as one merged file.

What is good for honing your thinking as well as processing vast amounts of info? Preferably the ability to add images would be great, like I use Dynalist all the time for the beginnings of drafts or class notes, but the inability to add images or in-line multimedia severely limits it, and I end up using Logseq or Siuyan for it if this need ever arises. What the latter two have that make them stand out is the ability to open pdf highlihgts to that specific area in the pdf in a side pane in-app, as well as the ability to insert the reference/link to those paragraphs anywhere in any outline. It's awesome, but it's like all these apps are islands in themselves, each with certain features that are great but nothing that's even remotely satisfying enough. I guess that's the one thing that brings many of us back here again and again.

Thanks.

Notion fits somewhat but there's only manual links and not direct PDF highlight linking last I looked. It's flexible and has a generous free plan for students/academics, with unlimited blocks/pages.

If you've used Logseq and Siuyan I'm surprised you haven't delved in Obsidian, which does most of what you're looking for but whose PDF highlight linking is supposed to be less seamless than Logseq.

Much as I dislike Evernote, it mostly fits your needs, though you won't be able to try out PDF linking and annotation in the free plan. It too offers a discounted plan for students/teachers.

One newer learning app might include Pixno AI Notetaker. Pixno is great at turning visual material into structured notes, and it integrates with notetaking apps, specifically touting integration with Notion, Obsidian, Google Docs, Evernote, and MS-docs.

https://photes.io

Hi Satis,

photes.io seems intriguing, thanks for the recommendation. I did try out Obsidian a couple of times, uninstalling it every time. The last time was almost a year ago, but it had this very annoying problem of putting images in the document as sub-documents in the navigation pane, which became insanely chaotic after just a few docs. The dark look was also not appealing, but mostly it was the navigation pane uselessness, and no outliner mode (although there are probably extensions for all that). But you're right, it might be worth checking out with fresh eyes to see if it is more useful now than in the past.

Thanks for the suggestions.

satis wrote:

Notion fits somewhat but there's only manual links and not direct PDF
highlight linking last I looked. It's flexible and has a generous free
plan for students/academics, with unlimited blocks/pages.

If you've used Logseq and Siuyan I'm surprised you haven't delved in
Obsidian, which does most of what you're looking for but whose PDF
highlight linking is supposed to be less seamless than Logseq.

Much as I dislike Evernote, it mostly fits your needs, though you won't
be able to try out PDF linking and annotation in the free plan. It too
offers a discounted plan for students/teachers.

One newer learning app might include Pixno AI Notetaker. Pixno is great
at turning visual material into structured notes, and it integrates with
notetaking apps, specifically touting integration with Notion, Obsidian,
Google Docs, Evernote, and MS-docs.

https://photes.io

I believe this might be addressed by the Obsidian option to put attachments elsewhere other than in the current folder with the document.

Devonthink remains my go-to for organizing information. I think version 4, which I can't yet run due to my antiquated coal-fired Mac, has a node map function. That's the only Obsidian feature I wish DT V3 had, and it's not a deal killer for me. The see-also pane in the Inspector does what I need, even though not graphically.

My quirky beef with Obsidian is that I need a separate copy of each community plugin in each vault. I prefer many vaults/databases over a single huge one.

Lucine wrote:

Hi Satis,

photes.io seems intriguing, thanks for the recommendation. I did try out
Obsidian a couple of times, uninstalling it every time. The last time
was almost a year ago, but it had this very annoying problem of putting
images in the document as sub-documents in the navigation pane, which
became insanely chaotic after just a few docs.

@Amontillado:

Good to know there is that option in Obsidian!
It's sad there isn't anything remotely like Devonthink for Windows, from what I know so far at least.
Re-installing plugins for every vault does sound like a pain and not really scalable. That's the main impression I had of obsidian, that it doesn't scale well.

@Satis:

As for Evernote, IIRC they drastically reduced the number of free notes overnight some years ago, that seems like a douche move and they seem unreliable. I remember when Diigo was the rage back then and they did something similar by retroactively putting limits so you couldn't do anything with your notes anymore. I had an Airtable-Zapier integration with Pocket that had been passively adding Pocket links to Airtable for years since I forgot I had set it up, turns out they set the limit on the amount of items per base at some point and my links stopped being synchronized. It's their right if it's reasonable (which in the case of Airtable it might have been, I never went back to see what the new limits were etc), but once a company does a douche move, it's hard to trust them again.
P.S. if you suggest Evernote, why not OneNote instead? It's free, unlimited and has more features than Evernote right?

Amontillado wrote:

I believe this might be addressed by the Obsidian option to put
attachments elsewhere other than in the current folder with the
document.

Devonthink remains my go-to for organizing information. I think version
4, which I can't yet run due to my antiquated coal-fired Mac, has a node
map function. That's the only Obsidian feature I wish DT V3 had, and
it's not a deal killer for me. The see-also pane in the Inspector does
what I need, even though not graphically.

My quirky beef with Obsidian is that I need a separate copy of each
community plugin in each vault. I prefer many vaults/databases over a
single huge one.

Lucine wrote:
Hi Satis,
>
>photes.io seems intriguing, thanks for the recommendation. I did try
out
>Obsidian a couple of times, uninstalling it every time. The last time
>was almost a year ago, but it had this very annoying problem of putting
>images in the document as sub-documents in the navigation pane, which
>became insanely chaotic after just a few docs.

Lucine wrote:

if you suggest Evernote, why not OneNote instead? It's free,
unlimited and has more features than Evernote right?

I personally don't like or use either, and OneNote excels in some areas like free availability of advanced features (OCR, ink-to-text, audio/video recording, dictation), and tight integration with Microsoft Office and OneDrive. However, its search is less powerful, and its organizational structure can be more complex for quick acces.

Evernote I think has better search (including images and PDFs), strong task management with reminders, cross-device sync, and support for text/images/audio/scan/PDF notes. Evernote's search allows searches across notes, notebooks, and even inside attached documents (Word, PDFs) on paid plans, and its tagging and notebook system is simpler and more intuitive than OneNote’s three-level hierarchy (notebooks, sections, pages), which some users find cumbersome. Evernote supports to-do lists both within notes and on its dashboard, blending note-taking with task management. OneNote has tags but less integrated task tracking.

As for Evernote's significantly reducing its generous free plan, it found it was too generous and that a significant cost burden to its system was due to freeloaders who could not be induced to pay. Offering 100,000 free notes and 250 free notebooks was a dumb thing to do and it's no wonder so many people took advantage of it, weighing down the company in the process.

Considering that Evernote has long lost money, and had massive staff reductions to right itself, and then sold itself to another company, its ations seem fairly reasonable. Companies ranging from Dropbox to Mailchimp to Trello scrubbed digital barnacles off their hulls and reduced or eliminated their free plans to keep cruising... or afloat.

What is the critical feature that you need? Is it the PDF annotation? Because notetaking, images, tasks, reminders, powerful search, outlines, and exports of notes are available in The Journal, same app I recommended last time :-)

@Amontillado, I have seen you post several times about how you use Devonthink in your research work.
I am most interested in how you use it for notetaking. (I have a memory of reading how you use Devonthink for notetaking along the lines of Obsidian or other such software. I tried to search where you wrote about this in the forum, but could not find your comment. Apologies if my memory is wrong).
If you use it for notetaking can you point me to some resources in how you do this?

I have a little time to tinker with apps before another large research project commences. After working with Obsidian for some time, Capacities looks very attractive to me. I have to rely on a lot of plugins to make Obsidian work for me, but the plug-ins I need to use are causing me too many problems. Capacities seems to have what I need out of the box, with more features on the roadmap that I think will help me get better work done much easier.

I want to see if Devonthink opens up better ways to take notes, and you seem like the perfect source of guidance. :)

Amontillado wrote:

I believe this might be addressed by the Obsidian option to put
attachments elsewhere other than in the current folder with the
document.

Devonthink remains my go-to for organizing information. I think version
4, which I can't yet run due to my antiquated coal-fired Mac, has a node
map function. That's the only Obsidian feature I wish DT V3 had, and
it's not a deal killer for me. The see-also pane in the Inspector does
what I need, even though not graphically.

My quirky beef with Obsidian is that I need a separate copy of each
community plugin in each vault. I prefer many vaults/databases over a
single huge one.

Lucine wrote:
Hi Satis,
>
>photes.io seems intriguing, thanks for the recommendation. I did try
out
>Obsidian a couple of times, uninstalling it every time. The last time
>was almost a year ago, but it had this very annoying problem of putting
>images in the document as sub-documents in the navigation pane, which
>became insanely chaotic after just a few docs.

Cyganet wrote:

What is the critical feature that you need? Is it the PDF annotation?
Because notetaking, images, tasks, reminders, powerful search, outlines,
and exports of notes are available in The Journal, same app I
recommended last time :-)

Outlines and pdf quick-jump are the most critical, other than that, it'd be nice to have side by side views of different docs (which TheJournal has too, you're right that's a good one), the doc/information unit to hold formatted text and images including embedded videos would be great. I currently use OneNote whenever I have to take notes under the video while watching a video since in logseq you have (had) to write the iframe code to embed videos, and in OneNote you just paste the link and it auto-embeds the video. Then readjusting the video size is also trivial in OneNote while the iFrame embed in Logseq was static in size.

Other features: the ability to split writing and learning in different docs (any app does that) but also combine/merge any amount of them into a single doc once you're done processing the topic and want to keep the essence but discard the rest. I think Scrivener has a merge function, but it's not really useful for interacting with data from web or pdfs.

Right now my study notes are messy and sort of everywhere between Logseq, Scrivener, Onenote, Remnote, Dynalist, etc. Some PDFs are also in Zotero but there they're isolated from the rest of the notes.

Maybe it's just a case of software overload and any of the above can be made to work well enough if enough effort is invested in it. It's just difficult to do so when there are so many options out there.

Good to know TheJournal has tasks and reminders and outlines, maybe that one is the most useful other than for PDFs and webpages after all. It also has topics which is pretty good.

P.S. apparently the more recent versions of RightNote let you navigate by tags as well, aside from by folders.

Darren, you do me great honor.

Devonthink support often says they don't believe DT is a note-taking app but I don't understand why it isn't.

For note-taking, I imagine I use it much the way Obsidian users do.

I have a Keyboard Maestro shortcut for creating a new Markdown document, which is my favorite kind of text document. The shortcut doesn’t really do much. It prompts me for a name, creates the document, and opens it in a separate edit window. Devonthink supports Mac keyboard shortcuts, so you can add many functions that way, too.

Or, in the middle of one note add a double-bracket reference to a new note name. That’s called a wikilink in Devonthink.

When you click on it (or right click to open in a new tab), it creates the new file.

The Devonthink see-also Inspector tab is not terribly different in strategic function than Obsidian’s node map. It’s a list of files, not a graphic, although I think DT version 4 has a graphic node map. I’m stuck on V3 until I can run a newer MacOS.

Lately, though, I’ve been using Devonthink to evolve something that serves the function of an outline.

I have a couple of posts on my blog at https://thirdreef.wordpress.com about my new favorite outlining technique. I called it object outlining because for some reason I wanted a fancy name for it.

Basically, create notes of two types. A fact note covers a single isolated fact. A description of the Genii’s lamp, a character description, or a thumbnail description of a McGuffin, for example. It’s about a person, place, or thing without any story narrative.

The other note could be called a story note, a beat, or a narrative note. Here, you get to tell the story but you should reference facts rather than write them.

For instance, Jack and Jill fell down the hill. That’s fine in a narrative note but you need to direct future-you to notes about Jack, Jill, and that fateful hill.

I generally don’t do that with links, I use transclusion. That way, notes for Jack, Jill, and the hill will appear inline and will be in my face. If the hill becomes important to the story again in chapter 20, its note will be transcluded in the chapter 20 narrative note.

Better yet, if chapter 20 requires some new element to Jill’s character, I can edit Jill from chapter 20 and the updates will appear everywhere else Jill is transcluded.

Every narrative note becomes sort of a dossier on what happens at a point in the story. Facts, as they are refined, are consistent across all references to them.

I’ll confess I’m very happy with Devonthink. However, outlining via transclusion can be done just as well in Obsidian.

You can convert a wikilink to a transclusion by replacing the square brackets in the link with curly braces. In Obsidian, add a “!” character in front of the square brackets.

Devonthink will convert name-based wikilinks to UUID links. That’s a little better than linking by name because UUID’s avoid confusion if a second note is created with the same name.

There are only three Obsidian plugins I use, although that might change if I really dove into it. For what I’ve done in Obsidian so far, Tasks, Dataview, and File reorder cover the features I want. That’s about an extra megabyte per vault. Not that much.

Devonthink’s Smart Groups do what I need Dataview for. File reorder is a native feature of DT, and while DT is not a credible task manager on its own, I’ve recently discovered it’s not useless for tasks. The trick is to use it in conjunction with a task utility. Just about anything will link to DT notes through x-devonthink URLs.

But none of that is any more than how I’ve used DT for a specific use case or two. Please update this forum with how you discover the best in any note utility you favor. That’s the important stuff, and I look forward to learning from your experiences.


Darren McDonald wrote:

@Amontillado, I have seen you post several times about how you use
Devonthink in your research work.
I am most interested in how you use it for notetaking. (I have a memory
of reading how you use Devonthink for notetaking along the lines of
Obsidian or other such software. I tried to search where you wrote about
this in the forum, but could not find your comment. Apologies if my
memory is wrong).
If you use it for notetaking can you point me to some resources in how
you do this?

MarginNote 4 is very good for working with, annotating, taking notes on single or multiple PDFs grouped together.

https://www.marginnote.com

@Amontillado, thanks so much for your detailed reply.
Allow me some time to ingest the learnings in both your reply and your blog so I give the proper response you deserve.
"Object outlining" ... you have me intrigued! :)

Amontillado wrote:

Darren, you do me great honor.

Devonthink support often says they don't believe DT is a note-taking app
but I don't understand why it isn't.

For note-taking, I imagine I use it much the way Obsidian users do.

Paul Korm wrote:

MarginNote 4 is very good for working with, annotating, taking notes on
single or multiple PDFs grouped together.

https://www.marginnote.com

That looks excellent! Is there anything similar for web/windows?

MarginNote is Mac / iPad only.

A similar option, for Mac and Windows, is LiquidText

https://www.liquidtext.net

Lucine wrote:

That looks excellent! Is there anything similar for web/windows?

RemNote checks all these boxes. It's built for academic learning with very good PDF integration.

It doesn't have a formal task manager built-in but it's got full table/metadata tagging capability (like Tana) so you can design it to be a task/project manager.

I'm not an academic, I'm an industrial project engineer. I use it primarily as a project manager with inline project tasks as well as a "long term knowledge tree" with embedded spaced repetition to internalize key facts and concepts.

Related topic: Spaced Repetition is a mis-applied and under-appreciated 2nd brain tool that's changed my life.

I use "spaced repetition" in place of "note reviews". It's why I love RemNote. I'm very bad at intentionally reviewing my notes with any consistency. I'm even worse at reviewing "opinion notes" like intentions, habits, mantras, priorities etc I want to internalize. SR has become my personal hack for this deficiency. There's a lot less friction to me idly flipping through some SR cards when waiting at the doc office than to try and remember that my "new habit" note exists AND to feel like reviewing it right now. With SR I can sneak in micro-reviews randomly during the day with way less resistance and trick myself into reviewing my stuff.

Imagine replacing all that time doom scrolling facebook, bluesky, reddit etc and scrolling through a random feed of your 2nd brain instead. Obviously the 2nd thing isn't the same level of dopamine hit but it's a much lower threshold habit to activate than...actually reviewing a specific list.

I feel like it's increased my working memory and general brain function. For a long time I tried to externalize as much info as possible into my 2nd brains.
Our meat brain is for having ideas, not remembering them, right? That approach turned me into an overwhelmed scatterbrain. My brain forgot how to remember things. This new hybrid approach has started to reverse that. Obviously I can't/shouldn't memorize my digital brain but I CAN memorize key points AND consistently remind myself of the scope and shape of my digital knowledge tree. Feels good to let my brain spread its wings again and flex a bit.

Our meat brains are still the GOAT of making magical idea connections but it needs INTERNAL material for that. I had forgotten how good our brains actually are at internalizing a huge amount of info without a downside. For example I'm HORRIBLE at remembering names. I found that locking in some names with SR made me much better at remembering names in general. Does having 30 more names "locked in" reduce how much other stuff I can know? Oddly no, it seems to have the opposite effect. All I had to do was "wake up" that part of my brain again. When I'm doing cards on a regular basis I have less brain fog and feel much more engaged and effective. Spaced Repetition, applied generally, is great brain exercise and can make all your digital brain "evergreen".

Most people think SR is only for learning rote facts. Of course it's great for learning names and state capitals. But it's also great for...EVERYTHING ELSE.

Keyboard shortcuts, quotes, jokes, favorite memories, bucket list, bible verses, etc.

Another of my many shortcomings is remembering arbitrary decisions and sticking with them. Such as:

-where does my favorite screwdriver live?
-where do I store/index my car maintenance records?
-what tag do I apply to "someday maybe" project ideas in Remnote?
-when's the best time to look at my calendar/tasks for tomorrow
-where am I tracking my dog's monthly flea/tick treatment and where's the reminder

Those administrivia things where the final choice doesn't matter as much as consistently sticking with that choice. My dumb brain has a really hard time remembering the choice I made about it last week. The next time the thing comes up my dumb brain just churns through the trade-offs again and re-enters the same indecision loop. I drive myself crazy doing this.

Simply adding a SR tag to "you decided to do X this way because of Y" is the way through. It doesn't even take that many card reviews, which is the magic of spaced rep. I'll see it often at first and I'll remember my choice just fine. Eventually I'd forget but the magic of SR will remind me before it's lost to the void again.

The reason that SR within RemNote is superior to standalone SR apps like Anki/Memrise is because RemNote "cards" live within your notes. That way, when I see the reminder card "the dog's records and plans are here" and my brain inevitably thinks "but wouldn't x work better for this?..." I can simply jump right to the note tree that led to that decision and see that I had this same genius idea about 6 months ago and decided against it because of . So instead of changing the card I simply write a "check in" comment to my future self making fun of my self for trying to get myself stuck in a loop again.

It sounds silly but doing this has made me realize that what I often believe are new ideas are actually a small number of repeat thought loops that keep haunting my mental space at the expense of real progress. I'm finally able to break those loops now.

Nathan, thank you for sharing your unique perspective, that's a very original way to use spaced repetition. The way you use it seems like such a great addition to daily life. Now spaced repetition has become one of my "musts" in search for the holy grail app too!

Remnote seemed great but many features are for subscribers only. The spaced repetition part is still free, of course, but it just leaves a bad aftertaste knowing that they see students as cash cows. Their
seemingly good intentions to help students study better was just an illusion, or wrong interpretation on my part since it was started by people who claimed to be recently graduated or current students. Even in western Europe, few students can afford their asked price in monthly payments, let alone anywhere else. Maybe in America, I don't know.

It is otherwise very well-made and the integration of spaced repetition with a main notes repository would have been ideal.


nathanb wrote:

RemNote checks all these boxes. It's built for academic learning with
very good PDF integration.

It doesn't have a formal task manager built-in but it's got full
table/metadata tagging capability (like Tana) so you can design it to be
a task/project manager.

I'm not an academic, I'm an industrial project engineer. I use it
primarily as a project manager with inline project tasks as well as a
"long term knowledge tree" with embedded spaced repetition to
internalize key facts and concepts.

Related topic: Spaced Repetition is a mis-applied and under-appreciated
2nd brain tool that's changed my life.

I use "spaced repetition" in place of "note reviews". It's why I love
RemNote. I'm very bad at intentionally reviewing my notes with any
consistency. I'm even worse at reviewing "opinion notes" like
intentions, habits, mantras, priorities etc I want to internalize. SR
has become my personal hack for this deficiency. There's a lot less
friction to me idly flipping through some SR cards when waiting at the
doc office than to try and remember that my "new habit" note exists AND
to feel like reviewing it right now. With SR I can sneak in
micro-reviews randomly during the day with way less resistance and trick
myself into reviewing my stuff.

Imagine replacing all that time doom scrolling facebook, bluesky, reddit
etc and scrolling through a random feed of your 2nd brain instead.
Obviously the 2nd thing isn't the same level of dopamine hit but it's a
much lower threshold habit to activate than...actually reviewing a
specific list.

I feel like it's increased my working memory and general brain function.
For a long time I tried to externalize as much info as possible into my
2nd brains.
Our meat brain is for having ideas, not remembering them, right? That
approach turned me into an overwhelmed scatterbrain. My brain forgot
how to remember things. This new hybrid approach has started to reverse
that. Obviously I can't/shouldn't memorize my digital brain but I CAN
memorize key points AND consistently remind myself of the scope and
shape of my digital knowledge tree. Feels good to let my brain spread
its wings again and flex a bit.

Our meat brains are still the GOAT of making magical idea connections
but it needs INTERNAL material for that. I had forgotten how good our
brains actually are at internalizing a huge amount of info without a
downside. For example I'm HORRIBLE at remembering names. I found that
locking in some names with SR made me much better at remembering names
in general. Does having 30 more names "locked in" reduce how much other
stuff I can know? Oddly no, it seems to have the opposite effect. All I
had to do was "wake up" that part of my brain again. When I'm doing
cards on a regular basis I have less brain fog and feel much more
engaged and effective. Spaced Repetition, applied generally, is great
brain exercise and can make all your digital brain "evergreen".

Most people think SR is only for learning rote facts. Of course it's
great for learning names and state capitals. But it's also great
for...EVERYTHING ELSE.

Keyboard shortcuts, quotes, jokes, favorite memories, bucket list, bible
verses, etc.

Another of my many shortcomings is remembering arbitrary decisions and
sticking with them. Such as:

-where does my favorite screwdriver live?
-where do I store/index my car maintenance records?
-what tag do I apply to "someday maybe" project ideas in Remnote?
-when's the best time to look at my calendar/tasks for tomorrow
-where am I tracking my dog's monthly flea/tick treatment and where's
the reminder

Those administrivia things where the final choice doesn't matter as much
as consistently sticking with that choice. My dumb brain has a really
hard time remembering the choice I made about it last week. The next
time the thing comes up my dumb brain just churns through the trade-offs
again and re-enters the same indecision loop. I drive myself crazy
doing this.

Simply adding a SR tag to "you decided to do X this way because of Y" is
the way through. It doesn't even take that many card reviews, which is
the magic of spaced rep. I'll see it often at first and I'll remember
my choice just fine. Eventually I'd forget but the magic of SR will
remind me before it's lost to the void again.

The reason that SR within RemNote is superior to standalone SR apps like
Anki/Memrise is because RemNote "cards" live within your notes. That
way, when I see the reminder card "the dog's records and plans are here"
and my brain inevitably thinks "but wouldn't x work better for this?..."
I can simply jump right to the note tree that led to that decision and
see that I had this same genius idea about 6 months ago and decided
against it because of . So instead of changing the
card I simply write a "check in" comment to my future self making fun of
my self for trying to get myself stuck in a loop again.

It sounds silly but doing this has made me realize that what I often
believe are new ideas are actually a small number of repeat thought
loops that keep haunting my mental space at the expense of real
progress. I'm finally able to break those loops now.

nathanb wrote:

I'm not an academic, I'm an industrial project engineer. I use it
primarily as a project manager with inline project tasks as well as a
"long term knowledge tree" with embedded spaced repetition to
internalize key facts and concepts.

Related topic: Spaced Repetition is a mis-applied and under-appreciated
2nd brain tool that's changed my life.

I use "spaced repetition" in place of "note reviews". It's why I love
RemNote. I'm very bad at intentionally reviewing my notes with any
consistency. I'm even worse at reviewing "opinion notes" like
intentions, habits, mantras, priorities etc I want to internalize. ...

Oh, you're describing me.

Your usage of Spaced Repetition sounds like the solution to one of my problems. :-D

And it creates a new problem: Now, I need to look for a PKM that's based on MD files in the file system and supports SR without relying on (clunky and crash-prone) plug-ins like Obsidian. And has an iOS app. :-(

Are there (other) PKMs that support SR out of the box? And store notes in MD files, locally?



Hm. I should not come here. CRIMP struck again.

I too am looking for a software that has integrated spaced repetition, and stores files as md locally, but is Windows/Linux instead. If anyone knows something, please let me know. I'll update with any new finds here, including for other OSes.

Franz Grieser wrote:

nathanb wrote:
>I'm not an academic, I'm an industrial project engineer. I use it
>primarily as a project manager with inline project tasks as well as a
>"long term knowledge tree" with embedded spaced repetition to
>internalize key facts and concepts.
>
>Related topic: Spaced Repetition is a mis-applied and under-appreciated
>2nd brain tool that's changed my life.
>
>I use "spaced repetition" in place of "note reviews". It's why I love
>RemNote. I'm very bad at intentionally reviewing my notes with any
>consistency. I'm even worse at reviewing "opinion notes" like
>intentions, habits, mantras, priorities etc I want to internalize. ...

Oh, you're describing me.

Your usage of Spaced Repetition sounds like the solution to one of my
problems. :-D

And it creates a new problem: Now, I need to look for a PKM that's based
on MD files in the file system and supports SR without relying on
(clunky and crash-prone) plug-ins like Obsidian. And has an iOS app. :-(

Are there (other) PKMs that support SR out of the box? And store notes
in MD files, locally?



Hm. I should not come here. CRIMP struck again.

Lucine wrote:

I too am looking for a software that has integrated spaced repetition,
and stores files as md locally, but is Windows/Linux instead. If anyone
knows something, please let me know. I'll update with any new finds
here, including for other OSes.

What I found out so far:

** RemNote **
available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android
cost: 8 Euro/month or 395 Euro for lifetime license
no local storage (at least, I failed to find an option to specify a folder on my local disk)

** Obsidian with one of the SR plug-ins **
available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android
Obsidian is free, syncing is not.
local and cloud storage
Don't know yet whether the SR plug-ins work on iOS/Android, too.

** Anki **
available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android
Open Source and free
local and cloud storage
does not directly support MD but reads/writes TXT files
There are Obsidian plug-ins that export MD files to Anki (haven't tested that)

Another candidate:

** Logseq **
runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android
stores MD files locally
has a flashcard feature
Open Source

I haven't really used Logseq but will give it a try.

Franz, thank you for the suggestions. In theory, SiYuan also has a built in flashcard (or maybe it was a plugin) but the functionality overlaps with logseq and the latter is better in many ways (local md files, whiteboard that works with zotero highlights direct linking through drag and drop, etc). But I didn't find it satisfactory for some reason.
Other options I found, just for reference and in case someone else is looking for the same in the future:
- traverse.link (online-only so no go, very limited free version and $15 a month currently, although they claim to have student discount but then i'd have to upload my student id card or reveal my real name to claim it and that's a no go for some random website)
-mochi - local-first, md, functional free version, pro tier doesn't add much, can imoport from anki but exporting back into anki loses data, so too walled-in

Maybe something like a "random card" function in a note-taking/PKM app that can be applied only to a specific subtree/folder could work too, though the answers would have to be in a separate file (maybe linked at the bottom of the question). and something that can open in split view and voila, you have a question/answer solution. but the spaced repetition algo would be missing, not sure if the standard spaced repetition algo is applicable to literally any person though since people can be different in so many ways, why not in the way they process repeated info?



Franz Grieser wrote:

Another candidate:

** Logseq **
runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android
stores MD files locally
has a flashcard feature
Open Source

I haven't really used Logseq but will give it a try.

Lucine wrote:

...In theory, SiYuan also has a
built in flashcard (or maybe it was a plugin) but the functionality
overlaps with logseq and the latter is better in many ways (local md
files, whiteboard that works with zotero highlights direct linking
through drag and drop, etc). But I didn't find it satisfactory for some
reason.

Hi Lucine.
What's the reason(s) you didn't find Logseq satisfactory?

Hi Franz,

I can't really point to anything specific that's wrong with it. Part of it is that I need to work with multiple non overlapping subjects (eg classes) and working from one graph for everything hinders search and also it's been hard to context switch despite making some main pages for each topic. And not having structural navigation makes it feel like something is missing for me personally.

Another is a bit superficial, but the aesthetic kind of sucks.
I also feel like you can't do much with the notes you make from highlights despite that it really is a useful feature to jump to my point of any pdf from anywhere in the entire graph.

And finally, I noticed I've mostly only been using it as an outlier/whiteboard card when I need to jot down and process something quickly, then those notes are usually not important enough to copy them elsewhere and it's more for temporary rapid thinking and the outcome goes into other apps which have more folder organization and which I plan to go through and sort someday.

For me, Logseq ends up filled with docs and boards that don't need to be used anymore so there's a lot of loose half assed outlines and cards everywhere in the graph. I wonder if others have experienced this problem when using Logseq too.

One last thing. I do much prefer block level Knowledge items to pages in Obsidian etc but I haven't explored all the features. Somehow it just doesn't click. Maybe it needs more time and active use before it starts snowing its full power.

It would be so nice to have something that can emulate the genius idea behind Outline4d but also incorporate modern necessities such as images, videos, fields, tags, outliner with infinite zoom at any bullet and other document objects we've become accustomed to.

I'd also like to know if you or people here (or otherwise) use logseq with separate knowledge graph for separate topics. It didn't really occur to me that that's an option to separate topics but then you can only use one graph simultaneously I assume.


Franz Grieser wrote:

Lucine wrote:
>...In theory, SiYuan also has a
>built in flashcard (or maybe it was a plugin) but the functionality
>overlaps with logseq and the latter is better in many ways (local md
>files, whiteboard that works with zotero highlights direct linking
>through drag and drop, etc). But I didn't find it satisfactory for some
>reason.

Hi Lucine.
What's the reason(s) you didn't find Logseq satisfactory?