[HN Gopher] Howm: Personal Wiki for Emacs
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       Howm: Personal Wiki for Emacs
        
       Author : setopt
       Score  : 52 points
       Date   : 2024-09-03 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | setopt wrote:
       | I recently discovered "Howm" [1] (the "Handy Own Wiki Mode"),
       | which is a personal wiki system for Emacs. Surprisingly, it is
       | slightly _older_ than Org-mode - although it now works great with
       | Org files - and is still actively maintained by the author.
       | 
       | After giving it a try, I now feel that I prefer it's simplicity
       | over newer systems like Org Roam and Denote, while having some
       | similarities to e.g. Deft (like fulltext as-you-type search).
       | 
       | It also offers some unique features of its own, like "comefrom
       | links" as opposed to conventional "goto links", and that most
       | Howm links are actually just syntactic sugar for searches.
       | 
       | The submitted link [2] is to a third-party documentation of the
       | project, which I found more useful than the official
       | documentation to get started :)
       | 
       | [1]: https://kaorahi.github.io/howm/
       | 
       | [2]: https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual
        
         | smartmic wrote:
         | I switched to Howm about a year ago (after trying and actively
         | using dozens of other PKM systems), and it's by far the best
         | I've come across.
         | 
         | The whole design is well thought out, consistent and not
         | created with the aim of marketing, but because it has served
         | the creator well with his way of working (and surprisingly the
         | philosophy applies to many of us). Japanese "engineering" at
         | its best, so to speak.
         | 
         | As Howm has become such an important part of my everyday
         | digital life, I will certainly write my own blog article about
         | it one day. Until then, I can recommend the blog entry by Leah
         | Neukirchen in addition to the manual linked here:
         | https://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2022/03/note-taking-...
        
           | gwern wrote:
           | The Neukirchen link would be a much better HN submission than
           | OP.
        
       | k_bx wrote:
       | The best similar thing for Emacs I've ever used was Deft inside
       | my Dropbox (or whatever is your server of choice). Simple,
       | Markdown, has link navigation.
        
         | natrys wrote:
         | Similar feeling here. I found that simple full-text search goes
         | a long way to scale without needing to impose structures (and
         | things like backlinks). It will probably not be enough for
         | prolific note takers but I think it's enough for people with
         | say <1000 files.
         | 
         | (although I use Xeft[1] which is spiritually the same but I
         | find the UI cleaner and snappier because it uses Xapian rather
         | than elisp for full-text search).
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/casouri/xeft
        
       | shrubble wrote:
       | I use this and it is fantastic for my use case as well; I use
       | Syncthing to sync it (just a directory with other directories and
       | files) across multiple systems so I always have the latest
       | notes/todos wherever I am.
        
       | dustfinger wrote:
       | How does Howm compare to org brain? especially in terms of
       | scalability.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-03 23:00 UTC)