For people with a personal knowledge management system:

How do you keep a reliable “current state” of a project when information is scattered across old notes, newer notes, references, files, screenshots, and drafts?

Do you use a master note, MOCs, tags, periodic reviews, project dashboards, backlinks, or something else?

I’m especially curious how you handle stale notes or contradictions between older and newer information.

The thing most softwares, specially the PKM products functions in a specific manner. You open it, you ask, it responds. No proactive initiative involved. There is obviously a work around by connecting it to AI but even then it is not proactive in true sense.

The gap between a thinker and a software(PKM) is not about storage or retrieval problem. It's all about engagement between you and your tool. Lets say you captured something and also managed to connect your ideas together, and then it just sits until you remember to comeback to that idea or that connection.

A proactive tool changes that relationship without taking over it. You are still the one doing the thinking. But instead of the tool waiting silently, it notices things and brings them to your attention.

Here is a real example of a tool that i have built. You capture ideas over time about community decision making and voting systems. You never explicitly connected them or drew a conclusion. But across those captures, an unstated implication exists. "If community voting mechanisms are vulnerable to manipulation, why do they still design systems that rely on them?". That tension was never written down. You never flagged it. But it was sitting there across your own positions.

That is the kind of question the tool surfaces on the dashboard. Not randomly and not generically. The question gets chosen through a few layers. First it looks at what tensions actually exist in your graph, contradictions between ideas, implications derived from two positions you hold, unresolved threads from previous sessions. Then it scores those candidates against your cognitive map. A question gets a higher score if it sits in territory where your thinking is currently active and a lower score or gets dropped entirely if it falls in an area you consistently disengage from. Then it gets phrased based on how you tend to hold positions, directly if you are declarative, more openly if you are exploratory.

You get to decide what to do with it. Explore it, dismiss it, sit with it. The tool just made sure you did not miss it.

That is the distinction. By proactive, I do not mean autonomous. It means the tool is constantly paying attention so you do not have to hold everything in your head at once. You stay in control, you just have a tool that is actually working with you rather than waiting to be asked.

Most PKM tools optimise for capture. The better question is what surfaces the right thing at the right moment. That is the gap and proactive initiative i have built around.

9999s obsidian copycats, 9999s "revolutionary embedding + llm side chat" etc etc

Hi everyone,
I’m trying to find the best method or app to take and organize notes, because right now everything is scattered:
• Handwritten notes in various notebooks
• A bunch of open website browsers / tabs
• Printed copy articles
• YouTube videos saved under “for later”
I want one place (or one simple system) where all of this lives, so I’m not constantly jumping between apps and physical stuff.
What approach would work best for:
• Capturing handwritten notes (scanning or photo + text)
• Saving & tagging web pages/articles (with some way to see them later)
• Linking YouTube “for later” videos to relevant notes/projects
• Keeping it all searchable and not turning into a new kind of mess
I’m open to:
• One “all-in-one” app (e.g., Notion, Obsidian, Evernote, OneNote, etc.)
• Or a minimal system with 2–3 tools that actually work well together
If you’ve solved this kind of problem, what’s your setup? What app do you use, and how do you structure your notes (folders, tags, projects, templates, etc.)? Any tips on how to start migrating from my current chaos without losing everything?
Thanks!

most of my PKM has always been articles, highlights, docs, random notes, etc.

but the stuff i most often want later is usually from conversations: project calls, study calls, debates with friends, Discord/Slack voice chats, even a 20 min voice note where someone explains something well.

those feel weirdly underrepresented in PKM systems. they are high signal, but they disappear because they are not already "documents".

ive been thinking about a lightweight rule after any useful conversation:

• what changed my mind?
• what decision got made?
• what explanation would i want to reuse?
• what disagreement is still unresolved?
• what should be searchable later, not perfectly summarized now?

curious if anyone here intentionally captures spoken conversations as part of their PKM, or if you keep PKM mostly written-only?

iThoughtsX was a native Mac app for years, then with an iOS-only mobile companion (iThoughts2go) and finally a Windows version. Then Toketaware ceased trading. The downloads vanished. It's gone from the App Store, and if you upgrade your Mac or phone, there's no guarantee you can get it running again.

I have maybe a hundred or so maps dating back to 2011, some of them have 70,000 nodes in them, so converting them all has never been an option for me, I just want read/edit access back to them, especially from my Mobile.

So I built a browser version. It runs entirely client-side and (hopefully) it 'feels' like the original as much as possible. Read Up on the software journey here

The beta is live at ithoughtsx.com/beta. (I was lucky to grab one of the old domains)

This is FREE, I'm not advertising, just offering a solution to those like me that lament the day that iThoughts went away!

What works today

File handling

Open .itmz files via file picker, drag-and-drop, or, if you install it on your mobile's desktop as a PWA App, you can get OS file association.

Viewing and navigation

Full tree rendering with fold/unfold. Keyboard navigation with arrows for parent, child, and sibling movement. Click to select, double-tap to edit, long-press to drag.

Editing

Inline text editing (double-tap or Enter). Tab creates a child, Enter creates a sibling, Delete or Backspace removes a node. Drag-and-drop to reparent on both mouse and touch. Reorder siblings with Cmd/Ctrl+Arrows. Reparent with Cmd/Ctrl+Left (promote) or Cmd/Ctrl+Right (make child of previous sibling). Fold or unfold with the period key or by toggling the region. All edits sync back to the file.

Search

Full-text search across the entire map, or scoped to a subtree ("From Here")

Mobile editing (touch toolbar)

On touch devices, a bottom toolbar gives you tappable buttons for everything that normally needs a keyboard

Cross-platform

Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge. Installable as a PWA (Add to Home Screen on mobile, install on desktop). Offline support via service worker - once loaded, it runs without a connection. Tested on real devices eg old iPad 2 running iOS 9, plus modern Android and iOS.

PWA features

Self-updating: checks for new versions and prompts to reload. File association and share-sheet integration so .itmz files open straight into the app.

What is coming soon

Native app via Tauri - A Tauri 2.0 wrapper around the same web app, giving native file open/save dialogs on desktop and Android. On mobile browsers, every save currently triggers a download. Tauri should fix that with native file dialogs

What is not included (yet)

• Canvas-style layout - Layout is currently an auto-layout tree, more like an outline than a true "Map". I'd like to get it working, but my first goal was getting you access to your data. Open to encouragement here.
• Cloud sync - No direct access to clouds, everthing is local, but you may be able to browse to your DropBox, iCloud etc via the file picker. (mine is working even for Resilio Sync)
• Rich text formatting - No bold, italic, colours, or per-node styling in the editor. The parser preserves these attributes on round-trip, but the UI doesn't expose them yet.
• Icons and images - Not rendered or editable. Preserved on round-trip if your file has them.
• Notes - Parsed and stored, but not displayed (I never used these much, but if you did let me know and I'll add)
• Export - No PDF, PNG, OPML, or Markdown. You can only save back to .itmz.
• Search and replace - Search is built; replace isn't planned for the near term.
• Undo/redo - Not yet implemented. Be careful with delete - there's no rollback.
• Import from other formats - Only .itmz. No Freemind, XMind, or OPML import.
• Themes - The app uses a single visual style. The original iThoughtsX had 16 themes; none are ported yet.

Try it

Go to ithoughtsx.com/beta, open an .itmz file, and have a go.

If you've got an .itmz file, test the full round-trip: open, make some edits, save, and reopen.

On mobile, install it as a PWA (Add to Home Screen) for the best experience this gives you file association (if you share the file from your filer app) and offline mode so you are not depending on the website.

Feedback

I want to hear about:

• Bugs - anything that breaks, especially on mobile or older devices
• Mobile usability - the touch toolbar is built, so you can create, edit, fold, and search on touch devices (delete is menu-only on touch, since there's no undo yet). Tell me what still feels missing or awkward.
• File compatibility - if you have complex maps (nested folds, links, notes, colours), open them and let me know if anything renders incorrectly or gets lost on save (it shouldn't)
• Feature priorities - let me know what you want next.

Message me or leave a comment below or on my blog. If you want to be notified when the Tauri native app lands, pm me and I'll add you to the list.

This is a solo project. The original iThoughtsX is by Toketaware; this is an independent browser-based implementation that reads and writes the same .itmz file format.

I’m working on a non-destructive book scanning workflow and trying to understand a very specific problem:

Web articles, PDFs, and Kindle highlights are relatively easy to get into Obsidian/Notion/Readwise. Physical books are where my PKM workflow breaks.

I’m trying to talk to people who have actually tried turning physical books into searchable notes, Markdown, highlights, or a personal knowledge base.

A few questions:

1. Have you ever wanted to bring a physical book into your vault or second brain?

2. Would you care more about full OCR, highlights/quotes, summaries, or clean page images?

3. What would make the output “good enough” for your real workflow?

I know a lot of pkms tools but I keep on being doubt about why I should build up a pkms and what advantages I could gain from it. I think this might be a stupid question but it bothers me every time I read or hear topics on this.

I was trying to track down why a specific decisionss were made a few years ago, and I realized the entire thought process is just gone.

The Slack thread auto-deleted. The Zoom calls weren't recorded. We have the final outcome but zero record of the actual reasoning that got us there!(Please don't tell me I'm overthinking)

Think about Darwin or Einstein. We have their letters and notebooks. We can see the messy first principles reasoning, the wrong turns, and the arguments they had with colleagues because they wrote it ON PAPER

Now the most important technical and scientific work in the world is happening in Slack, Signal, and Discord.

And it all just deletes automatically. We are generating more important knowledge than ever before and losing almost all the context behind it.

We get the outputs (papers, code, policies) but we lose the reasoning. In a few decades we are going to have systems we depend on completely but cant actually explain how they were built or why certain trade-offs were made. We wont be able to interrogate the main source which can be used to save so many ch time for building future projects

The monks who copied manuscripts didn't do it for fun. They knew preserving knowledge takes active work. But right now we just let the internet default to temporary

Has anyone else noticed this happening in their field? How are you actually preserving the "why" behind the work? And yes before anyone of you comment, YES this was a 3 am thought.

Most so called second brain tools are just storage with a search bar. You capture something, it sits there, you retrieve it later if you remember to look. That is not a second brain, that is a better organised pile.

A real second brain should work on continuity. Your thoughts do not exist in isolation, they build on each other, contradict each other, cluster around themes you did not even consciously notice. A system that just stores and retrieves is missing the entire point.

Here is how I have been thinking about it.

When you capture something it does not just get filed away. It gets tagged and connected to everything else you have put in. Not just because the topics sound similar but with actual reasoning on why two ideas are linked and what that connection actually means. Contradictions between your own captures get flagged. Insights get generated from the connections not just the individual ideas in isolation.

Then it goes a layer deeper. When a cluster of connected ideas starts forming around a theme you never explicitly labeled, the system identifies it and synthesises across the whole cluster. Not just these things are related but here is the actual thesis sitting underneath all of them.

Every time you open it there is something already developed waiting. Connections made, contradictions flagged, insights generated, themes synthesised. All from what you put in.

That is at least my version of what a second brain should actually do

I've seen a lot of people to use Obsidian purely for just jotting down some notes here or there or have massive markdown compiled lists of information that are necessary to their work/everyday needs.

It seems like a massive hassle to setup though, which is unlike Notion's more modular take on productivity.

My main question is if you are using Obsidian as your own daily productivity tool and tracker for whatever, what are the pros and cons of using Obsidian rather than Notion? There are so many things to setup and learn how to do compared to Notion.

EDIT:
Also btw i am NOT hating on Obsidian, i also found Notion to be limited and hard to use at times, I am a completely new user to Obsidian so maybe i'm just slow at trying to figure out the markdown formatting lmao

EDIT 2:
Thank you to everyone who shed some thoughts and insights on Obsidian!