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Using git wiki instead of evernote to organize personal content

aurel kurtula on October 31, 2017

After reading João Cerqueira's post on how he recommends Organizing your life using Github I thought, "yes, I'm not the only one to see the benefi...
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Paul Jacobson

I love this idea. The challenge with an Evernote replacement is decent mobile access to notes and being able to create new notes on the go. Also, Evernote's OCR becomes really useful with large libraries.

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Matthew Orndoff • Edited

OCR is great. Plus with the web clipper, you can import entire articles into Evernote.
Couple that with the Cmd+J shortcut and at some point you realize you've built your own personal Intranet.

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Paul Jacobson

Exactly and this combination of features is difficult to replicate. The key challenges that I encounter when I consider viable Evernote alternatives (I've been a relatively satisfied Evernote user for about 8 or 9 years but I am a little concerned about having so much data in there) are usually the following:

  • cross-platform access to my data
  • OCR capability to make images and PDFs accessible via search
  • the ability to add to and modify notes with my mobile device.

The closest I've seen to a possible replacement would be something like Google Drive and Dropbox, albeit paid versions.

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aurel kurtula

I think if you use it that much, evernote is great and I find it had to imagine any tool competing with it.

I used it for 6 months and all I did was write, that was all, write and clip pages. As a writing tool I found evernote's editor lacked a lot.

Hence, those were the only features I wanted to replicate. Auto generation of notes, tagging, the ability to use my favorite editor and for all my notes to be backed-up.

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João Cerqueira

Hey Aurel! Nice post here! As I said before, this is a very interesting way of using the Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket's Wiki for organizing notes and documenting development logs.

Maybe you could share with the community the generator you've written, I believe it'd be of interest to many (including me).

Congratz!

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aurel kurtula

Ha, I didn't want to share the code as it's not the most organised code I've written, the project was a learning exercise that turned useful. Anyway, here it is github :) I also added it in the post. At some point I'll definitely refactor it.

Thanks

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Alex Popescu

I tend to use a filename pattern that allows ordering them by age: yyyy-mm-dd-rest_of_the_name.

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aurel kurtula

I like that idea, will add it in when I come around to rewrite the code.

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Ian Kirker • Edited

You might also want to know that the software used to render GitHub's repo wikis is called Gollum, and is freely available under an MIT license.

I also sometimes use Grip, a tool which uses GitHub's own Markdown rendering API with local Markdown files, for previewing READMEs or just quickly generating a nice-looking render.

(Not that I have anything against your renderer, just thought it might be useful info.)

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aurel kurtula

Thanks

I did use Gollum when I first thought of the idea but I don't remember why I didn't like it. Most likely because I wanted to use gitlab, can't remember.

Grid looks cool I'll definitely give it a try.

Thanks for sharing

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Brett Stevenson

Hey aurel, I too have been using markdown and GitHub for managing my class notes for about a year and a half now, but your node generator is a really great idea, I might have to make one for myself!

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aurel kurtula

Cool, basically me and you have been doing the same thing. The generator is just a quicker way to create the actual file and make sure it's automatically linked with other notes

What's what ever it's worth, you are welcome to play around with what I have

Thanks

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Omar White

Before I had used one note for something like this. But I think I may try this because I like the idea of using git. Thanks for the idea!