There's also the category of "infinite outliner apps". The OG of these is Workflowy[1] which is a minimalist's take on the idea. Personally, I use Dynalist[2] which is Workflowy with more features.
My current problem with these tools is that I tend to treat them as mostly a "write-only" medium. i.e., I don't really refer back to them that often. What I'm really looking for is a tool that will let me _serendipitously_ encounter ideas from the past. For that, I think that Roam[3] with its Mediawiki style "backlinks" might be the next thing that I spend some serious time with.
Either that or a tool that somehow encourages me to refactor thoughts from the past into more (currently) useful content.
Interesting, I haven't heard of (1) and (2) but as I've mentioned Roam Research also seems a good take on this idea. From my (recent) experience it appears their app is not yet stable enough to use as a daily driver, though. Notion [0] seems like a more mature version based around similar principles.
As for idea rediscovery I'm personally happy with the setup I devised for myself
so I can only suggest trying to emulate something similar. If you're interested,
some guiding principles I follow:
1. My note-taking app (Vim, but could also be the browser or anything else) is constantly open in the
background, and I have a keyboard shortcut to show/hide.
2. I maintain an index document of sorts (with TODOs, recent thoughts, outward
links). This is frequently updated and I don't think too much about
categorization.
3. Either Markdown `#` headers or `*` are mapped to Vim folds,
which allows me to use `zm` and `zr` to quickly expand and collapse document
outlines.
4. Treat tags as a "brain-dump". Just quickly come up with some keywords before
starting to write
the note. If you do that, I find even simple tools such as ctags and grep immensely
help with future rediscovery.
5. Backups are on GitHub so I have the double convenience of both tracking document
history, as well as being able to access all notes from mobile.
It's served me well thus far; most commercial note-taking apps will handle (4)
and (5), while (1) is easy to resolve (e.g. AutoHotkey on Windows) so there's
probably no need to make drastic changes to your setup if you wish to try it out.
My current problem with these tools is that I tend to treat them as mostly a "write-only" medium. i.e., I don't really refer back to them that often. What I'm really looking for is a tool that will let me _serendipitously_ encounter ideas from the past. For that, I think that Roam[3] with its Mediawiki style "backlinks" might be the next thing that I spend some serious time with.
Either that or a tool that somehow encourages me to refactor thoughts from the past into more (currently) useful content.
[1] https://workflowy.com/
[2] https://dynalist.io/
[3] https://roamresearch.com/