Personal management knowledge and productivity tools has been important for me, especially for my chaotic behavior (pardon me). I started taking notes in Zettelkasten method since the first time I entered uni, so it’s been three years ago. And since I’m a huge fan of terminal apps, I’ve been doing this on my terminal; Neovim is my preferred tool for taking notes.
Zettelkasten on Neovim
I mainly use Neovim, I’ve used zk and zk-nvim. The zk CLI experience was decent because its use is intended for writing notes in Zettelkasten method. I love the way it already provides some basic commands to create notes, to filter my notes, LSP, etc. To support my workflow, I also installed marksman LSP, so it was all great. But, since it only works on desktop, I looked for another solution; both in desktop and my Android phone.
I’ve never liked Obsidian app on both desktop and Android, to be honest. Why? Simply because I prefer simplicity and cleanness on the UI (but Ray, you never liked GUI apps at all! You’re a fucking terminal nerd). In my opinion, Obsidian doesn’t met my requirement on what a clean UI is. I never enjoyed writing notes in Obsidian especially on phone. Fine, the plugins are cool but still, I don’t like its UI; too much clutter. From all of this time, GUI apps on desktop often confuses me; too many buttons, opened tabs here and there and will likely distracts me.
So, my workflow all these time was: I write notes in Neovim with the help of zk and obsidian.nvim, and mobile is for read-only. It’s really rare of me to take notes on phone. If I really need to write stuff, I prefer to do it inside Keep and add it later to my Obsidian vault from desktop.
From writing notes alone, I already used many software and after years of doing this, I was thinking “this is too much”.
Found Logseq
After three years of doing that, I decided to look for another solution. I found Logseq. I always looked away from Logseq while I’m searching for alternatives because at the first impression, I didn’t really understand how to use this software; it uses bullet points to take notes, which I thought it’s kinda weird and I haven’t tried much whether it could render markdown. Since I was too exhausted on using my old workflow because from time to time, it makes me lazy to write notes because inconvenience, I tried Logseq once again.
After learning the usage for a while, I was amazed and regretted that I always looked away from this app. I wish I started with Logseq earlier rather than the Obsidian workflow.
Logseq is actually usable for my zettelkasten workflow out of the box rather than using Obsidian that needs some setups. It doesn’t force me to give my notes titles because Logseq approach is more to journaling, so, when you open the app, it’s already on today’s note. Sure, Obsidian can also do this by using plugin or setting up some stuff on the settings page but compared to Logseq, Obsidian still needs too much work to set it up.
I never thought that I really love the idea of writing on the journal page directly that it has less work only for writing notes.
I’m naturally not a writer nor have the ability to write long paragraphs. The bullet point approach on Logseq helped me to write my notes better than just writing on a plain markdown where I think I need to write beautiful sentences. I love that I can directly write core ideas within each bullet points. What if a particular core idea has a child or a branching idea? Just press enter and indent the bullet point, no need to write conjunction words.
Logseq fans have been waiting on the new Logseq DB version which I myself also can’t wait to try it out. Since it’s still on beta version, I consider myself to stay on the original Logseq app for now but I wish the DB version is will be better and improved alot. Thanks Logseq devs!
Conclusion
So that was my journey on personal knowledge management tool. I don’t know if my future self will move to another software but for now I found Logseq is great and suitable for me.