Lot of good, standard-issue advice in your replies already, so I think all I'll add is: (1) Everybody's mind is a little different, so you're likely to need to experiment with many things for a long time before you start converging on stable insights into what your specific needs are, and they're likely to be somewhat context-dependent, so they're likely to evolve over time; so above all else, be patient and go easy on yourself and focus on your long-term progress rather than your short-term frustrations; (2) ...I forgot (not joking)

Thanks very much, this sub-thread has been illuminating for me, and has the compelling quality of being obvious-in-retrospect. I now wonder what my MPC is doing, exactly, when I make an action at what appears to be a zero point. Thanks.

If I had the capacity to take on this kind of modeling project right now, I'd probably lean toward Prolog or something like an OWL/Protégé ontology. Then it could just metastasize to the limits of my time and neurochemistry.

Just doing it in Emacs is also an option.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252952

Any titles or resources you have found particularly interesting?

Warning: opening a can of worms. Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)

Wow, I've had an interest in the history of note-taking but that is a huge list. Have you read all those books? Do you have a top 5?

Yeah, this subject is a bit of a rabbit hole. I've read about half of the so far. That's my list of sources from those that I have so far.

I would say start with:

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (This is a fast micro history that hits the highlights.)

* Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair (She is a scholar that has a lot on the subject.)

* Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini (This is a collection of pretty deep essays.)

* Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski (This is about the development of paper-based databases.)

Thanks for taking the time, I appreciate it. If you write anything on the topic I'd be interested in reading it.

Libraries’ resources are not infinite, therefore most of them are explicitly optimized for circulation, not preservation. If they’re allocating valuable shelf space and staff time on something no one is using, they’re misallocating resources. You know what makes librarians’ hearts warm up? For people to use their spaces, collections, and services.

You're in for a treat. The quote, in case you haven't looked it up yet, is "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." The canonical work is The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

It's indexing with imakeidx that's keeping me on LaTeX. Does anyone know offhand the state of indexing with Typst?

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Indexing

With a quick search I can see that the `in-dexter` package [1] provides something quite similar, though I'm not sure if it covers all usecases.

If you want to handroll this yourself you can probably have your `index` emit some `metadata` [2] which you can then `query` [3] for in your `printindex`. All of this would work inside the typst compiler and there would be no need for running an external `makeindex` command.

[1]: https://typst.app/universe/package/in-dexter

[2]: https://typst.app/docs/reference/introspection/metadata/

[3]: https://typst.app/docs/reference/introspection/query/

Thanks. My search found that also, but it didn't appear to have the features I need, at least not at the time. If LaTeX becomes vexing enough, I'll consider the custom workflow you're describing. Thanks for the tips.

@dang I trust you are writing or will eventually write a book about your time here and what you’ve taken from it. I hope I hear about it!