You often see questions like this pop up in places around the Emacs community: how do you take notes in Org Mode?
It’s a good question, most often framed with reference to programs like Obsidian, and the pros and cons of Emacs as a “knowledge management” system.
Integrated apps like Obsidian are great for the general population who may not require the deeper levels of customization that makes Org Mode worth learning.
I’d say Org Mode has more personality, so far as software can have such a thing.
There are surely as many ways to “org note” as there are Org Mode users.
But I would like to ask a question rarely asked in our community: should you publish your notes to the web? Or, at least, write notes in such a way that you could publish them—even if you prefer to keep them private?
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while: Org Mode distributed notebooks.
The org-to-html export functionality is ideally suited for this.
Likewise, org supports hyperlinking, image assets, and pretty much everything you would need to create rich online notebooks. You would simply need a web host or take advantage of free hosting via GitHub pages.
This is very web 1.0, but I think that’s what I like about it.
Why do this?
I like this idea of the “Feynman technique”: learning hard things by teaching yourself via notebook entries.
Do you really understand a concept if you are unable to explain it?
Think about it. Writing your notes in such a fashion that they could teach someone helps you make sure your writing makes sense.
By the way, if you like topics like these you would love my books, Emacs For Writers and Git For Writers.
I’ve been experimenting with this “distributed notebook” idea by writing music theory notes in Org Mode and exporting them as linked HTML files. They’re definitely not ready to distribute yet, but getting there.
On the plus side, it’s nice reading my notes like a website I can bookmark and quickly reference without having to open up Emacs.
What are your thoughts? I’d like to see more oddball Org Mode ideas like this pick up momentum. Feel free to leave me a comment below on how you like to org note.
I dream org-mode integrate Nostr and vice versa, meaning Nostr client (Emacs included) could render org-mode. It would be the web 4.0 reborn 🙂
I think the answers to your questions are pretty obvious:
“Should you publish your notes to the web?”
Not if they aren’t somewhat polished and reasonably self-contained so they are understandable by other. If they are, then it is probably best to publish them.
“Or, at least, write notes in such a way that you could publish them—even if you prefer to keep them private?”
Ideally yes, but who has the time to do that for every note? I publish some things that I polish, I keep other things private (and sometimes return to them in the future to pplish and publish).