Re: org-mode for knowledge management

[Brett Viren <bv@bnl.gov>]

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Hi Louis,

Louis <lbmlist@hethcote.com> writes:

> I've been using org-mode for a variety of purposes for a few years. I
> find that it suffers from the same problem that other such tools
> do. The problem is me. I can't remember week to week how I may have
> classified some scrap of information. Did I drop it into
> notes/someproduct.org or was it procedures/someprocess.org?

I hear you.  My strategy so far has been: just write org content and an
ideal lookup solution will eventually be found (via threads like this
one!).

This weekend I took a first step and *finally* got agenda-based
searching to work.  For better or worse, my setup intentionally spreads
org content over a few areas:

For a few explicit, "global" files (eg, todo.org)
  ~/org/*.org          

For daily, private notes:
  ~/org/web/notes/<YYYY>/<MM>/<DD>/notes.org   

For a wiki-like blog / knowledge bank:
  ~/org-pub/topics/<TOPIC>/index.org

By default, my attempts with org agenda search was not finding files in
these areas.  Particularly the latter two were difficult for me to
figure out how to tell org about.  The final solution was to walk these
directories at initialization time and add all .org files found to
org-agenda-text-search-extra-files.  Here is the most concise way to do
that which I found after various searches:

(require 'find-lisp)
(setq  
 org-agenda-files (list "~/org")
 org-agenda-text-search-extra-files 
 (append
  (find-lisp-find-files "~/org-pub/topics/" "\\.org$")
  (find-lisp-find-files "~/org/web/notes/" "\\.org$"))
)

If anyone knows better ways to do this, I'm all ears.  I'm particularly
wondering how long-running org sessions will handle newly created topics
or notes in this setup.

-Brett.

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