My personal knowledge base, 16 years after the last one

In December 2006 I wrote a two-sentence post on this blog about starting a “personal KM tool”. I’d just reread Essential COM and ATL Internals, again, and I was tired of relearning the same details every time, so I’d looked at Evernote and picked WikidPad instead. The second sentence says that my diligence in actually putting things into it would matter more than the tool.

Reading it now, that second sentence is the only part that holds up, and 2006 me was right about it in a way he probably didn’t intend.

Obsidian reached 1.0 last Thursday, with a redesign and, finally, tabs, and it was all over Hacker News. I’ve been using it for about two years, so this seemed like a good moment to write down what the sixteen years in between looked like, because the honest version isn’t a story about finding the right tool.

The graveyard

WikidPad lasted most of a year. Then OneNote for a while, because I was deep in the Microsoft world and it came with Office. Then Evernote for a long time, probably five or six years, which is the longest anything stuck before now. Then a folder of plain text files synced through Dropbox, with a fast search app over the top, which was honestly the best of the lot for finding things and the worst for connecting them. I also bounced off a couple of outliners and one very nice app whose company went away.

Every switch had a reason. OneNote’s sync was flaky across machines. Evernote kept changing what the free tier allowed, and its editor did strange things to anything I pasted in from a web page. The text files were great until I wanted a link from one note to another. But if I’m honest, every switch was also a fresh start, and a fresh start is very pleasant. You get to set up your folders, import a few things, feel organized for a week, and not do the actual work, which is writing things down every day for years. That’s the Tools don’t matter lesson again, which I wrote in 2009 about vim and Emacs, and apparently needed to learn separately for notes.

Why this one stuck

Obsidian is a desktop and mobile app that works on a folder of Markdown files. That’s most of the reason. The files are mine, on my disk, in a format every text editor in the world can open. If the company disappears tomorrow, my notes are still a folder of .md files and I lose some nice features. After Google Reader, and that app whose company went away, that matters more to me than any feature.

The vault lives in iCloud Drive, so it syncs between my Mac, my phone and, with a bit of fiddling, the Windows machine. I know Obsidian sells its own Sync with end-to-end encryption and version history, and it’s probably better. I haven’t needed it yet. There’s no git in there either, which I keep meaning to fix, and which means a bad edit is just gone unless I catch it.

The other part that made it stick is links. You type [[ and the name of a note, and it links, and every note shows what links to it. That sounds small, and it’s the thing my text-file folder didn’t have. My notes on A Philosophy of Software Design from earlier this year link to notes on a dozen other things, and when I open the note on “shallow modules” I can see every place I’ve used the idea since, including two design docs and a 1:1 note. Nothing I used before made that kind of connection for free.

What’s in it

The structure is a handful of numbered top-level folders, roughly projects, ongoing areas, reference material and an archive, which I picked up from Tiago Forte’s PARA idea and simplified. The reference folder is the one I use most. Every system I run at home or on a server I rent has a note in there that’s basically a runbook: how it’s set up, what I changed and when, and the commands I’ll otherwise have to google again next year. It’s the credential inventory idea from work, applied to my own stuff, minus the credentials, which go in a password manager and never in a note.

Book notes go in there too, and meeting notes from work go in their own folder. I tried daily notes, a new note every day as a journal, and stopped after about three weeks. The graph view, the thing everybody posts screenshots of, I’ve opened maybe five times. It’s pretty, and I’ve never learned anything from it.

I use very few plugins. Obsidian’s community plugins are just code running inside the app with full access to the files, with no real sandbox, and it has hundreds of them. That’s a small version of the npm problem, and I’d rather have the four I trust than the forty I’d like.

The diligence part

The tool is better than WikidPad was, in every way. But what actually changed between 2006 and now is that I write things down when they happen instead of meaning to. The rule I try to keep is that if I had to look something up twice, it gets a note the second time. That one rule is responsible for most of what’s useful in there, and it would have worked in WikidPad.

Obsidian is free for personal use, and they’ve said 1.0 doesn’t change that. If you use it for work, they ask you to buy a commercial license at $50 a year, and I did, because I’d like this company to still be around when I write the 2038 version of this post.