Moving through note browsing history can be done with Alt-Left and Alt-Right. There's inter-note linking capability, also with an autocompletion dialogue. I keep them under version control, which lets me do things like answer the question "what new ideas for becoming more effective have I had over the past week?" (I didn't use the built-in version control plugin because I found its UI glitchy.) ( Alfred is nice for this on OS X.)Īll my notes are stored as plain text files on my hard drive. I configured a keyboard shortcut to open it, or bring it to the front if it was already open, using a modified version of the Linux shell script in this forum thread. (I replicated the same thing with nvALT on OS X with aText.) This has been useful for a variety of logging-type applications. Pressing Control-D, then pressing return inserts a timestamp at the position of my cursor. Then command-L works as a pretty good "jump to note" shortcut.) For example, I prepend reminders for future situations with "f.", journal notes with "j.", policy notes with "p.", Less Wrong post drafts with "l.", etc. (For Notational Velocity/nvALT, I recommend coming up with some kind of namespacing scheme so note names collide with note text less frequently in your searches. Only a few tools I've found seem to have comparable functionality: WikidPad (with Control-O), and the Notational Velocity family of information managers kind of have it. Opening a specific note to add another thought or idea to it is a very common operation for me and this feature makes it very quick. This is the proverbial 10% of the feature set that provides 90% of the benefit over scattered text files. Start typing in the text box and it autocompletes with the names of any of the notes in my notebook (or allows me to create a new note). Probably the most important feature: Jump-to-note capability with autocomplete. Here are the features that caused me to choose it over the other software I looked at: I looked at a lot of personal information managers before choosing Zim. This post is a fairly personal overview of my usage. I've found it to be a nice software tool for implementing some of the effectiveness advice I've read on Less Wrong. Several weeks ago, I began using personal wiki software Zim Wiki (free and cross-platform for Linux & Windows I recommend nvALT on Mac OS X) to record all of my notes-to-self.
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