When developing new projects I often found my self in the very same situation: I have read through tons of pages of manuals, wikis and books, and would like to create my own notes on the subject. Be it for a college subject, a new electronics project, or a complex subject I'm enjoying.
In any case, I need a way to add notes, attach files (e.g. PDFs, videos, source code, etc.) and insert images. Also, it's of upmost importance to be able to create hierarchical dependencies between my notes (i.e. subsections or similar) and be able to navigate through the data in an intuitive way that does not require tons of mouse-scrolling. And most importantly, the data must be easy to export and available offline, as I don't want to get stuck with any commercial services.
If you are in a similar situation, then read on.
My previous attempts
- A notebook: it's great, requires no batteries, and I can add hand-drawings to accompany any explanation. However, all data is sequential and I have to flip through the pages. Copy paste is not possible, neither is it attaching any digital files.
- A digital notebook: for me, personally, much worse than the above physical notebook. I always ended up with document with over 200 pages which become absolutely unmanageable.
- Tomboy: this tool was great back in 2008 when I started using it. It's basically a note-taking system that allows to create categories and supports hypertext (you can add links to other notes inside the current note). Still, it was too simplistic and had no good support for attachments.
- Mind-maps (digital): you name the software, there are so many. They are all great to display complex knowledge in a hierarchical manner. But these usually don't support notes within a node or became unmanageable when working with rather complex topics with no clear hierarchical dependence (i.e. mathematics, which is easier to arrange in a lattice than a tree).
- A website: it supports attachments of all sort and hypertext, but are rather tedious to edit, amend and correct on the fly. Also, I never managed to display dependencies in the way I would have liked them. Nonetheless, I found them extremely useful for smaller project. For example, working with Google Sites was very fast and intuitive.
- Wikipedia-like formats: much closer to what I was looking for, as they fulfill all requirements. However, I never found myself comfortable editing them. It became slow and tedious as when editing a website; whereas I'd have liked something quick and comfortable like when working with a notebook.
Enter TiddlyWiki
It is basically a Wikipedia-like platform, 100% free and opensource. Data can be easily exported to several formats, and most importantly, editing or adding new data is EXTREMELY easy and fast.
You can implement your own hierarchical management technique (I use tags for that purpose), and you can display them on a sidebar as a mind-map with a plugin. Which by the way, are available by the dozens. For example to write source-code (with highlighting), adding different file formats, or just changing the wiki's behavior.
And for my personal taste, the best feature of all: you can host it yourself on a server, or... just skip all the dazzle and treat it as a simple file that can be edited directly from your web-browser.
Lastly, let me say that it has become very popular within my research group for personal note-taking and knowledge sharing.
A starting point for TiddlyWiki
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