Weekly Journal 117 - Logseq

Logseq

I’ve been trying to build out a note management system built around a text editor, Visual Studio Code in this case, and plain text Markdown files. Most of the time I have felt like I have been repeatedly running into walls. While I like the editing experience in my favorite editor, it’s not a great tool for managing notes and information. Even with specialized extensions like Dendron, it just hasn’t felt right. I’ve come to the conclusion that using a tool designed specifically for taking notes and managing information has too many benefits to ignore. I still want my notes toolchain to be open source, so I am switching to Logseq. Logseq feels like the best of both worlds for my needs. It has great support for searching, filtering and linking notes together, and it saves my notes as plain text Markdown files under the hood. I can even supplement my use of Logseq with a text editor and other tools like ripgrep if I choose. The biggest downside is Logseq is written in Clojure. I don’t know Clojure and I don’t have any real interest in learning it, so I probably won’t be able to contribute to the project directly.

My goal now is to use Logseq for the next six months and really work on building out my knowledge base. I need to build up my habits and the rituals around taking notes in order to turn this into an excellent resource. I can’t do that if I’m changing tools every week or two. Maybe now I can make similar progress on building out a digital garden.