[GTALUG] information storage ideas

[D. Joe]

On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 05:23:55PM -0500, Giles Orr via talk wrote:

> If you're not a Vim user, I imagine there's an equivalent for Emacs.

The 800# gorilla of emacs organizational tools seems to be org-mode.

How that compares with vimwiki or anything else discussed so far in this thread, I'm not certain. Of the stuff mentioned, it certainly doesn't incorporate directly files of myriad filetypes, though emacs can be used to navigate amongst files in a directory. As with most of this, it depends on how deeply you invest in learning the tools and matching up its affordances with your needs and preferences. I mostly use org-mode for editing tables and spreadsheets, but I know people use it for much more than that, including calendar management, time tracking, reminders, to-do lists, and so on.

Another tool for organizing in-the-large a set of files that, collectively, are  too big to add and manage within a git repo directly is git-annex. The general idea, so far as I understand it, is to manage a collection of symlinks to files on the front end, while dialing in the right mix between redundancy (having all the files on all the sites) and sparseness (having only the files required on any given site). I've only dabbled in using this one--I began learning git so that I could use git-annex. I use the heck out of git now but never got back around to git-annex, though it remains on my "one of these days" queue.

My current practice is to keep a series of directories on topics, with one main metafile in each directory mostly plain text with some light Markdown. In the file I try to make note of what I'm doing in the directory over time. I might, for instance, paste the URL through which I downloaded a PDF stored elsewhere in the directory, for instance. I'll track this metafile, and other files in the directory as applicable, as a git repository. In the case of a downloaded PDF, I'd probably exclude it from the repo via a line in ./.gitignore 

This is an old, complex problem with at least as many answers as their are people searching for solutions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book