Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?

For me, there are two three things for personal information management:

  • for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.

  • for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months (“what was just the number of our gas meter?” “what is the process to clean the dishwasher?”) , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.

  • for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.

  • oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.

  • deadcatbounce@reddthat.com
    4·
    12 hours ago

    I started on Logseq, because I’m a contributing open source advocate. I fully intended to stay with Logseq.

    However, it seems to indent everything in the markdown including headings, bullet points and so on. When one loads a document into a markdown editor, one ends up removing all these indents before the document becomes ‘valid’. They’ve made some other unusual design choices that mean the markdown doesn’t read very well in plain text. I used Logseq for a year.

    There’s also a difficulty for me with getting help. For some reason Logseq help community seems to be based around the Discuss (sp?). It’s not easy to read because the lines are very short as it’s a messaging platform. The community is very very active though.

    I eventually got frustrated with trying to debug my Markdown outside Logseq, and went looking for another vehicle.

    Rather distressed, I installed Obsidian. It’s been designed with a more logical approach. To link to a heading in another document, the document is linked in a Wiki-like way (if you’ve chosen that format) with the heading separated by a hash symbol; in Logseq you get an unintelligible UUID plus all that indenting.

    There’s a lot of help within the Obsidian community but some of it is locked down in medium paid-for content. However, the hundreds of Obsidian YouTube channels and videos, obsidianrocks and obsidian.md sites are very well authored. AI searches augment the rest, TBF I don’t really use Google proxies anymore.

    Even though I’m a personal user, it’s worth it to me to buy a commercial licence to show my appreciation for the work that the two(?) developers have put in.

    The plugins use the published API and are all (?) open source AFAICT.

    Most of the issues I have with Obsidian are just related to my workflow. I think that there are probably plugins that will solve them.

    I don’t expect to be looking for another note-taking app anytime soon and it’s been over a year since I started with Obsidian. Understanding templates opened my world up enormously. I haven’t started data-mining in any meaningful sense yet.

    Just my tuppence.