Pulling from the best tools for thought

1

TiddlyWiki

Back in the 2000s, hosted and self-hosted wikis became popular for easy, collaborative web publishing and knowledge management. Like Wikipedia, they could be used to build out hyperlinked knowledge repositories. Many wiki-based tools focused on their use as personal notebooks, one of the most influential examples being TiddlyWiki. The simple versatility of the wiki laid the groundwork for what we call "tools for thought" today.

#Note Taking #Knowledge Base #Personal Knowledge Base 180 social mentions

2

Tana

Most recently, a tool in early access called Tana caught my attention. Their key innovation is taking the linked outline model of Workflowy and introducing schemas for nodes, making them into structured data. This gives Tana the embedded database functionality of Notion and Airtable, a step towards bringing the two paradigms of note-taking software together towards powerful, malleable tools for thought.

#Task Management #Knowledge Management #Outliner 20 social mentions

3

Org mode

Meanwhile, a separate paradigm of note-taking tools emerged, focusing on the nested, tree-like structure of the outline. Perhaps inspired by tools like OmniOutliner and Org Mode for Emacs of the 2000s, Workflowy appeared in 2010 as a no-frills web-based outliner.

#Task Management #Project Management #Note Taking 174 social mentions

4

Obsidian.md

Obsidian arrived in 2020 and is a local app focusing on Markdown files stored on your filesystem. Obsidian has a large plugin ecosystem giving it a wide breadth of features, but it’s especially appealing to those that want to own their data. If you strip away the plugins, Obsidian is a pretty simple hyperlinked Markdown editor.

#Knowledge Management #Knowledge Base #Markdown Editor 1454 social mentions