Added it to the list.

Yeah, definitely, especially at work.
It really helped me to switch off my “work brain”, because I know, that everything I did today is written down, and I don’t have to keep things in my mind anymore after work. Doing that was a blessing for my stress level and mental health.

It also gives me the edge above my colleagues that I “remember” everything I did in the last months, which is nice when my boss wants to know details of a project I did a year ago.

I basically can’t even remember what I did 5 minutes ago (ADHD says hello), but I know exactly where I can find that knowledge. This frees up my working memory (psychological term, not related to work) immensely. It’s basically like transfering more tasks onto your hard drive instead of keeping it in the RAM.

It’s also great to give me an graphical overview of all I think and work on all day, and unveals connections I never thought of between different topics.

For private use, it’s also great as a journal, though I gave up on that because I’m too busy for it and it cost too much time in my everyday life. But I still use it daily for normal note taking, e.g. results of some experiments at home, hobbies, thoughts, and much more.

I don’t use Logseq, I use Silverbullet, and yes, it helps A LOT. I have lots of random notes on random pages on how to do things at work, or on my personal servers or whatever. You know that feeling of “I’ve already had to deal with this, how the hell did I do it?” It’s completely gone.

If you use a good organization system with a hierarchy that makes sense and tags you can easily find stuff, so you can turn off your brain from having to remember all of that and it can focus on the thing you need to actually solve now. Don’t know if you’re old enough to remember a time before cellphones, we had to remember our friends number, nowadays this is not a concern, because your phone will remember the number for you, it’s like that but for everything, very liberating.

Do it!

I had some initial problems in the beginning, because I was used to linear note taking apps like OneNote or Joplin, but once I watched a guide on how it works, it clicked and now it’s my second nature. I even began to write my hand written notes in Logseq style!

TL;DR, if you don’t wanna watch any guides/ read docs:

• Indentation matters. Logseq works with a parent-child hierarchy
• You usually don’t open or create new pages, you write everything in your journal and link stuff there.
• Use links, either with [[Link]] or #Tag, which are the same. They crosslink different topics and reveal connections.
• Make use of plugins. There are thousands of it. Especially the Graph Analysis plugin should be included by default.

Have you tried QOwnNotes? I think it’s pretty good

Trillium is great. I’ve been scrolling through here to see if anyone mentioned it, and was gonna put it out there if nobody had.

I haven’t tried it out on android (if that even exists), though.

Yeah, the Android app is horrible. I only use it if I don’t have my PC in arm’s reach.

It feels sluggish, buggy, is overloaded, I always get sync issues (usually the last words I just typed go missing), and some features (especially the graph overview) don’t work at all sometimes. And the whole app sometimes feels like an alpha version, which is just a no-go…

I really hope the mobile app gets polished more over the next months. Many people nowadays mostly use mobile devices, and having such an unpolished app really hurts the image. And, PLEASE devs, test your software before shipping it out. Especially the mobile app is broken half the time.

I still gladly pay the 5$/ month for the optional sync and to support the devs.

Doctor, Doctor, my brother thinks he’s a chicken!

Too much fun! Like many other Comp. Sci. students, I spent way too many hours trying to get Eliza, an automated psychiatrist from MIT, to say something shocking. Weizenbaum, the developer, “was surprised and shocked that individuals, including his secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.” In this sense AI is nothing new because Eliza passed the Turing Test in 1967.

Honestly, just download/install from your package manager and then start using it. One of the best built-in modes is called Org mode. Don’t try anything crazy because it’s easy to get overwhelmed. It took me some periods of stopping and starting before things felt natural and became my daily driver.

How do you think one should get started with Emacs? Should they start start with regular GNU Emacs or should they install one of the “distros”?

I always recommend using the default setup for any software. The same goes for learning GIMP, Krita, Blender, FreeCAD, or whatever else, even though you can customize them all to your liking.

It is usually a good idea to try and learn the workflow that was intended by the people who developed this software, you could learn something from trying to use the computer in the same way that the professionals do. Same for Emacs: professional software developers have used it for almost 50 years, the default keyboard shortcuts are set the way they are partially for random historical reasons, but partially because they often make a lot of sense.

If you are interested, please check out my blog series on getting started with Emacs, called Emacs for Professionals

I would assume that “application” (or its short form “app”) implies some kind of GUI.

That makes sense. Maybe I’m just old but they are called as programs since punched cards, as well as on Unix, Linux, Windows (until recently apparently).

Not exactly sure but I think the term “application >> apps” started with mobile phones. So, to me they are different. At least that evokes this meaning in my mind. It seems not with younger people though.

I would say apps are software run with a runtime (PortableApps, Android apps, Windows Apps) while software runs by itself.

Another interpretation could be “little (software) tools”. I assumed with “apps” you wanted some shell tools.

Not exactly sure whose fault is this but if OP still wants to use the term “app”, they should at least mention it’s “desktop apps”, or just go with “programs” which is the proper term. Because even with “desktop apps” I still understand it is as web apps more likely.

Considering the community, that’s what should happen. However sometimes people don’t realize which community they are in and they just look at the title. If the first person who replied started with mobile apps, others possibly didn’t notice because of them and continued adding up.

Whoops, didn’t notice the /c this was posted to 🤦‍♂️

I have but found it clunky…

It’s not really FOSS, just the software-equivalent of CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND.

Yeah I’ve tried One Note, Evernote and notion before coming across Logseq and Obsidian. I’m really enjoying it. I haven’t given Excalidraw much use in obsidian but I may do so in the future.

Nice! Yeah you’ve definitely tried a bunch of apps.

What service are you using to self host obsidian? And is it cheaper than paying for obsidian sync?

I find it really hard to read for getting the information I need quickly, too much going on with too much useless info.

It has shortcuts that feel a little more natural to me and the ootb theming makes files more easy to navigate.
I know you can also theme nano but I’m lazy

ncdu is like Filelight but for terminal. It’s awesome!

We liked Readeck way better than Omnivore. Their browser extension is also very good.