Hierarchical note taking
Note
A method of taking notes i've been recently exploring is hierarchical note taking. It's basically what it sounds - organizing notes into hierarchies based on a topic, organizing subtopics and having infinitely nested structures. As opposed to zettelkasten, which revolves around no hierarchy and having it grow organically, knowledge bases that are more wiki focused (e.g. on concrete facts, tips and tricks, examples of usage) might benefit from a hierarchical approach from the get go. This approach facilitates searching and finding information, which is the main idea behind a wiki after all. Some ideas about titles of notes when doing hierarchical note taking:
- To avoid having infinite levels of directories for each new level of the hierarchy, note titles can contain the hierarchy. For example, a note in the emacs tips hierarchy would have the following title: emacs.tips.Tip 1
- Try having similar structures for similar topics. Like when learning programming languages for example, you could have a template hierarchy - as every programming language has similar ideas and concepts, this works well.
- Along the lines of templates - have "schema" files that describe the form of a hierarchy for easier orientation.
My main inspiration for hierarchical note taking is the dendron tool and the accompanying blog posts: https://wiki.dendron.so/
What i'm using to try it out is an emacs package that combines some of dendron's features with org-roam - https://github.com/vicrdguez/dendroam
