The first version was the amazing vimwiki, a system simple and elegant. It provided most of the features needed for a zettelkasten, and supported standard markdown. During this period I grew comfortable with Vim, which I consider the premier editing experience.

I began to use Taskwarrior, an amazing command-line task management tool. Taskwiki is another amazing vim extension that maps tasks between vimwiki and taskwarrior, allowing you to create "viewports" with various Taskwarrior filters. The combination of Vimwiki and Taskwarrior is exceptionally comfortable, and taught me my first important lesson: tasks and data are inseparable. It is impossible to provide sufficient information to do a task if that task is separated from its context, its data and metadata.

Eventually I grew tired of the limitations of editing text in a terminal. Vim doesn't support graphical things very well, and I wanted to view images inside my notes. While various extensions solve this problem, and adjacent problems, I had at this time noticed dendron.

Dendron features a mixed hierarchical/networked note setup, which (according to the creators) scales well with heavy use. While I still have not reached the ~10k note count that the authors asserted Dendron would survive, the structure appealed to me because at the time I was working with several sorts of knowledge that a hierarchy represents well–things like programming language concepts in multiple languages. Dendron also features a note-graph, which represents both the hierarchy of notes and the links between notes. This feature was most attractive to me, as inside Vim I was having trouble visualizing my entire zettelkasten.

Overall, the featureset provided enough value that I made the change. I adapted all of my vimwiki links (or most!) to Dendron's format, and began to implement some of Dendron's more advanced features in my daily use. I installed VSCode and a Vim emulation plugin, and away I went.

The first snag I ran into was the limitations of Vim emulation plugins, so I switched that plugin to vscode-neovim, which embeds neovim into VSCode. I learned a value here: closer to Vim is more comfortable. Vim truly allows you to "edit text at the speed of thought". Its modal paradigm turns the keyboard into a uniquely fluid control panel, optimized for text editing. Extensions often miss features or have subtle bugs. The closer I can get to actual Vim, the more comfortable I am when it is time to edit.

After Vim emulation, VSCode+Dendron's most significant problem was its lack of serious todo functionality. Taskwarrior and its sister program Timewarrior had previously handled my todo lists, while Vimwiki handled documentation and project management. Dendron had no such extension. VSCode's slow startup time wore at me, and I decided I didn't appreciate all of the higher-order features of Dendron. Additionally, around this time development on Dendron ceased, and while the project leader declared it good enough to manage his personal projects, several rough edges and missing features took away from its initial promise.

I switched to Vim again for a short time, and tried to find plugins to piece together some of Dendron's features while avoiding the pain points. Around this time I discovered another innovation, "Emacs Org-mode." This video by Harry Schwartz from thoughtbot showed up in my feed. Reluctantly, I watched it. After seeing the power of Org-mode I decided to give it a try.

This entire post will probably devolve into a shill for Emacs and org-mode at this point, but bear with me as I explain my use-case and needs first.

So, here we go again. Another transition. Each of the last has cost me more than a few hours of troubleshooting and problems and configuration. Theoretically, I was using markdown the entire time, but the unique link formats from Vimwiki and Dendron made transitions difficult.

Now I'm preparing to switch to another format, one with completely incompatible links, formatting, and functionality.

In fact, all of my links broke. All my code-blocks broke. All my LaTeX math snippets broke.

It took me weeks to reach the same level of productivity. But Org-mode's features are amazing, and it was well worth the transition.

The ability to write and evaluate code, mixed in with all my notes, is amazing.

print("Hello!")
print( 2 + 2 )

Hello!
4

Emacs' power and scriptability far outstrips everything that Vim had to offer, and Evil mode satisfies my desire for Vim's editing model.

Emacs also handles task management. The default org-mode todo manager is fine, but with the addition of edna for better dependency management and d12frosted's little hack for todo-items in hundreds of files, it becomes much easier to manage projects spread across a zettelkasten of knowledge. org-roam is the final piece of the puzzle, integrating the best of ID-based linking and backlink features into emacs.

I began using git around halfway through my wiki process. I wasn't very familiar with it when I began, but I've come to value it as a part of my daily workflow. It certainly makes data recovery easy, and coupled with a personal gitea instance it allows me to back up and access my projects from anywhere.

Half of org-mode's appeal is perfectly typset documents with LaTeX. I have a full texlive install on my writing machine, along with an extensive configuration for APA, MLA, and Turabian. I also have Citar set up with org-cite and Zotero to make citations a breeze. So far, manual formatting has been a thing of the past.

I use GPG and age to encrypt sensitive documents such as my journal files. It works fairly well with org-roam, which supports transparent file encryption.