HACKER Q&A
📣 trevorboaconstr

A better way to organize my research


Hi,

My mishmash of hyperlinks, bookmarks, pdfs, research papers, blogs, newsletters, infographic, podcast, recordings, are scattered across different folders and different apps across my devices. Its hard to keep track.

Anyone recommend a cross platform app that can do it? I’m very digitally disorganized right now. Offline/online/cloud. Simple. Sync. Quick. Visual.


  👤 techdragon Accepted Answer ✓
Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) is the only tool I e found that didn’t try and force me into a specific paradigm and let me develop an organisation for my disparate collections of notes and material much like you describe.

It’s own paid upgrade feature/service offers a cross platform sync that handles a couple of gigs of basically any type of document and is encrypted client side. At a price I’ve found perfectly acceptable for the excellent quality of service and as a way to support the ongoing development of what is otherwise a free program. It also works offline and does opportunistic sync so well I bought a PineNote e-Ink tablet primarily because I knew my note workflow wouldn’t be crippled by the device not having cellular data for immediately synchronising changes. Mac, android, iOS, desktop Linux, x86, arm, windows everywhere I’ve needed it I can get my documents.

I definitely recommend at least giving it a try and exploring the plug-in ecosystem to see if you can find a good set of workflows for your various documents and research. A few of the plugins are quite powerful and offer various visual management functionality like tag and link graphs, navigation features and other functionality. I don’t see myself being pulled away from it at this point and all I’m looking for is ways to better integrate other platforms with Obsidian because it definitely works for me.


👤 cc101
You might find Epiphany Workflow for the Mac interesting. It's on the Apple Mac Ap store.

👤 lurker137
Zotero is specifically built for this

👤 Venkatesh10
Rome research