from Hacker News

How to Make a Memex

by mapleoin on 2/25/20, 9:57 AM with 41 comments

  • by Multicomp on 2/25/20, 11:43 AM

    I just recently learned about using two square brackets in OneNote to make arbitrary links to existing pages or instantly create a new page on demand. It is quite similar to the linking in [[roam]] but the later offers up a drop-down of pages with similar names to click from, while the former just does an exact string match.

    I'm not sure which I prefer, but it has helped me in my OneNote uses recently.

    Having starte my personal memex journey with onenote 2010 and blending in the likes of mempad, notewiki, and dokuwiki for specific use cases, I'm feeling like I am close but not quite arrived at a program I can trust to feed more than the work notes of the day.

    The ideal app is a combination of Onenote, dokuwiki, and mempad, and seeing as I've not discovered the app that has all the following features yet, I may end up writing it for myself.

    1. Rich text support without required markup (but can convert markdown to RTF on the fly would be a nice bonus). Links need to be drop-dead simple to create, even two square backets feels like it could be simplified. Maybe I go for NoteWiki stye camelCase or PascalCase words?

    Winner: Onenote

    Losers: Notewiki, dokuwiki

    2. Offline first saving of files to a single encryptable file. I'm thinking if I end up writing something, it would be an scrypt encrypted sqlite database with a different file extension. Using the sqlite format enables later mobile apps to have a common save format.

    Winner: mempad

    Loser: OneNote, Dokuwiki

    3. True image / audio / table support. This program doesn't have to necessarily support the creation of these assets out the gate, but I should be able to copy/paste them into it and have them saved and retrieved safely. A file picker dialog box should be something I CAN use but never should have to.

    Winner: Onenote

    Loser: Mempad, Dokuwiki

    4. Full export to HTML with files placed in relative directories. A Microsoft Binder-like solution could be a bonus.

    Winner: Dokuwiki?

    Loser: ?

    5. Entire sqlitedb search for a given term

    Winner: Onenote, Dokuwiki, Mempad

    Thanks for skimming the wishlist. I've heard of notion (too online), CherryTree (no mobile app), NoteWiki (no images), and a couple more, but if you think you have a program that addresses most of these, I'd love to hear it.

  • by toyg on 2/25/20, 12:40 PM

    So uhm, how does Roam differ from regular wikis, beyond supposedly-better keyboard interaction...?

    The problem with any wiki-like app, in my usage, is search capabilities and the need for constant maintenance. Stuffing stuff in is usually pretty easy; it’s getting value out in the long term, that is the issue.

  • by joshvm on 2/25/20, 12:13 PM

    Roam looks fun, having played around with it briefly. There doesn't seem to be a way of getting it offline though (data export is possible) which is a bit of a killer for a note taking app, at least for me. I don't mind so much about privacy issues, but having to be online especially to review things would be a big problem e.g. during travel.

  • by carapace on 2/25/20, 4:09 PM

    I installed a Memex-inspired extension on my browser, but I don't use it. Most of the time I forget it's there. https://getmemex.com/ https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex

    FWIW, what I really want is a timeline that shows my browsing history.

  • by 16 on 2/25/20, 1:32 PM

    I loved the concept of "automatic bi-directional tagging" so much that I created a sorta-clone of Roam here: https://github.com/neutralinsomniac/exocortex

    It's still WIP, but I use it every day for my personal notes.

  • by tiagotrs on 2/25/20, 11:03 AM

    maybe someone is interested in a not so well known predecessor to Bush's Memex, Goldbergs 'Statistical Machine' http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/statistical.htm...

    "Bush seems to have said little in his published work about the antecedents of his Memex or of his microfilm rapid selector" - Buckland wrote a nice article summing it up: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html

    Shameless plug: Goldberg's life story and his search/pattern detection machine was the main inspiration to create Revealer - https://revealer.cc

  • by na85 on 2/25/20, 11:57 AM

    Roam looks pretty nice, but TFA argues pretty effectively for a private memex.

    How does the author reconcile that with putting their intimate thoughts into Roam aka someone else's computer?

  • by cushychicken on 2/25/20, 12:05 PM

    I love the references to the Memex in Stross's Laundry Files series.

  • by fsiefken on 2/25/20, 11:05 AM

    I use TiddlyWiki on a webdav server. With syncthing I sync with android, mac, windows and my VR headset with Firefox Reality. It also supports mindmaps.

  • by NoGravitas on 2/25/20, 1:28 PM

    Can't believe no one has mentioned org-mode yet.

    Org-mode is a mode for marked-up plain text files in emacs that gives you note taking, outlining, to-do lists, scheduling, project management, time tracking, and journaling. It's really a good candidate for a private Memex, and you can store it however you want, not just on someone else's computer. There are mobile apps for it as well, and somewhat less-capable compatibility modes for vim and VSCode.

    The only shortcoming I see for it as a personal Memex is the weak support for binary content (images, audio, word processing documents). It does support binary attachments, but they're not presented very well.

  • by SuperPaintMan on 2/25/20, 11:04 AM

    Very cool, just started playing around with roam because of this.

    There seems to be a lot of overlap with Project Xanadu and the related ideas. I've been playing with this idea for a while and there's been a handful of partial implementations [0]. A personal memex-style device has been a dream of mine for a few years now allowing for composition of pages and collection of various snippets with links back to the original sources.

    The main issue with transclusion (inlining portions of versioned docs) of documents is that the documents need to be versioned and permanently accessible (otherwise linkrot and broken documents happen). It would be nice to apply this to the web in general, but it goes against it's nature (and is fundamentally incompatible with styling).

    Markdown + Gitfs is the obvious choice here as it's simple, well supported and extensible. Most importantly it's decoupled from the interface/viewer itself. That and you get access to anything in a git repo out of the box. I've done some basic work on this [1][2] but life got busy.

    [0] http://lain.gboards.ca/cgi-bin/view.cgi?url=../docs/demos/do...

    [1] https://github.com/germ/XanaDown

    [2] https://github.com/germ/germ.xan

  • by thanatropism on 2/25/20, 12:36 PM

    There’s an explosion in “markdown-plus” formats.

    I’ve been toying with the idea of tags and internal links in my Huge Text File but I don’t give nearly enough mind to a consistent syntax even after toying with custom syntax coloring etc. I’m not even sure what goes in the text file — it’s getting cluttered with longform essays when it once was basically a phone number list before smartphones.

  • by kragen on 2/25/20, 9:58 PM

    It's interesting that nobody has mentioned TiddlyWiki; what does its saving story look like in the world of the modern featurectomy-ridden browser landscape?

  • by ahpearce on 2/25/20, 1:53 PM

    Since everyone is recommending note apps, I'll throw a plug in for Bear, if you have a MBP and an iPhone. Syncs via iCloud, and it's just simple, Markdown oriented notes with a simple tagging system. Good enough search. Haven't really needed anything else and it actually exports pretty nicely to various formats (Word, pdf, html, etc.).

  • by kragen on 2/25/20, 9:56 PM

    What is the user interface flow like in Roam for factoring part of a page out into a new page, or otherwise creating a new page linked to the current one? If a Roam screencast already exists I'm not finding it.

  • by TrevorFSmith on 2/26/20, 12:10 AM

    Or, you could build an actual Memex. https://trevor.smith.name/memex/

  • by mdszy on 2/25/20, 12:53 PM

    Tried Roam for a bit but an online-only option when most of my notes are work related isn't something I can do.

    I did just get an email from them about "Beautiful creations of the RoamCult"

    RoamCult? Come on. Calling your users a "cult" isn't cool or edgy or endearing in any way. It's weird. Stop.