Why can’t we use the very app that we use for everyday coding to also do note-taking and personal knowledge management? Why must we use separate apps like Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research, Bear, etc etc to organize thoughts? Well, we can if we use Emacs as our main editor — there’s org-mode, org-agenda and org-roam (search YouTube for many cool demos). But I’m not an Emacs user, and I prefer VS Code. If such a vibrant ecosystem exists for Emacs, then surely someone must have done it for VS Code right? Well, yes, that seems to be the case.
Update: Now I'm also experimenting with using VS Code as a note-taking platform using my own tooling.
There are some complete frameworks for taking notes in VS Code:
- Dendron — “The hierarchical note taking tool that grows as you do.” Dendron supports backlinks for ad-hoc connections as well as hierarchy. It scales to tens of thousands of notes.
- Foam — “Foam is a personal knowledge management and sharing system inspired by Roam Research, built on Visual Studio Code and GitHub.”
And some extensions that you can mix and match to create your own personalized note taking environment:
- Markdown Notes shows backlinks and adds Go To Definition, Peek Definition and autocompletion of Markdown links.
- Markdown Links shows a graph of local links between Markdown files in the current working directory, Zettelkasten-style.
Blogs:
Other interesting links:
Related terms:
- Zettelkasten
- Second brain
- PKM (personal knowledge management)
- Digital garden