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I've been using this plaintext set of notes since at least 2017, and have notes going back even further. I've had so many ideas for kitaab over the years. In fact, it appears to be one of the most consistent things I write about. Isn't it funny how that works.
Kitaab was / is my latest edition, where I moved to my own slightly custom markdown hybrid, and wrote a static site generator, and added some tooling in my vim config. It's served me well in that time, but more and more I'm finding it inadequate, and I'm not writing as many notes as I would like. The solution would be to further extend my own vim tooling and config, but that ended up being tangled up with my awful nix+vim config hell. I did, to some degree, untangle that mess, but it took all my vim energy with it. I never installed my new vim config, and it's been rotting on it's own branch for a few months now. I switched to using lazyVim on my work machine because I could no longer bear the burden of my own config, and kept my old, still janky vim config which is unmaintainable. This is rather unfortunate, because the scope I have in mind for Kitaab is broadening. I'd like to edit, search and generally interact with my notes on mobile, and nvim is no way to do that. Obsidian, and other plain text editing tools also get thrown out by my stubborn insistence on this individual format. I feel like I'm falling into the trap of gambler's fallacy.
In order to get back onto solid ground with my notes I have two options:
- Write a whole lot of software and commit to maintaining it for as long as I want to write my notes (forever)
- Switch to some more standardized format and leverage existing software and tooling that I don't have to write and maintain
In this regard, I'm choosing to try and switch to more "standard" tooling: Markdown, Yaml front matter, zk. I've also switched identities online for the most part, so I don't expect to keep publishing the same website anymore, though I may repurpose the static site generator, and swap out the parser for markdown parser. I'm hoping this switch will excite me to write notes again and get me excited and wanting to build tools related to my notes, like a mobile editor. It's also nice to benefit from newer, more feature complete tooling: dead links in vim, telescope searches, note creation templates and grouping. Lots of the primitives allow me to do things I've been trying -- and failing -- to do for about... checks notes 2 years. Huh 🤔, funny how that works. Maybe I'll finally be able to import shaarli bookmarks, wallabag and (if only) kobo annotations
There is one other trouble though, is that I've moved away from taskwarrior and built my own replacement, Mast, which I've only briefly mentioned before. I'd also built some integration between taskwarrior and my plaintext notes. I'm hoping to expose a similar API with mast so I can also deep link to the task from my notes, and similarly at least link to my notes from Mast with whatever form mobile Kitaab takes. Starting to see the scope here?