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The Obsession With the Right Tools

Foam IA Writer and using the right tools.

I started keeping my notes on Obsidian, but I had major sync issues between Mac, iPad, and phone. So I switched to GitHub to keep everything synchronized and to Visual Studio Code for writing and managing the repository. One of the Obsidian features that had intrigued me was the connection map. It probably has a technical name, I think it's called Graph View, but I called it the web of notes. This one: Immagine Graph view

When I switched to Visual Studio Code I discovered there was an extension: FOAM. Foam allows for a similar view and so I started structuring my note library to make Foam something useful and not just a neat toy [[NoteTakingFoam]]

alt from a distance, after just one day of use

Up close, in the most connected hashtags

Once it was all like this, nothing connected to anything. I had my directories, files were stuffed with content and became unreadable (they still are)

How it was before, in the peripheral areas

Now there's still nothing there. It still isn't a tool for knowledge, it still doesn't help surface connections between different topics.

Besides, I'm starting to get tired of Visual Studio Code. Very convenient for code and structured texts. I'd never write JSON without that editor. Also very convenient for searching texts, hunting down duplicate words, multi-line edits and other nerdy stuff like that. To maintain my Git + md file structure, I started using iA Writer. I'm still in the testing phase but it looks promising. Its brother iA Presenter has been on my Mac for months and, although I can never seem to use it to finalize work presentations, it's a valid help for organizing thoughts at the beginning.

iA Writer seems like a great program, one that removes everything that needs removing. Perfection… anyway you know the quote, we don't have to repeat it every time.

For this blog of mine too I'm using GitHub + md files compiled by eleventy (11ty.dev), "a simpler static site generator" as the first line of the official site says.

The motto of these days is simplify, remove the useless, get to the essence of things.

For now the feelings are excellent, let's see how it goes over the coming months.