I figured I'd reply directly rather than continuing to resurrect a dead thread.

You're right that there's a whole lot to talk about in this topic, haha. I'm not even sure how to tackle it. But I, also, want to nerd out about this PIM stuff -- so, this might get very long?

After thinking a bit, I guess the problem I have is I've got two different knowledgebases that I'm trying to figure out how to integrate.

First System

A little background -- I was an early, and HEAVY, user of Notational Velocity. I used it as the place to dump stuff as I thought about it, or capture stuff that I wanted to read later, or whatever. Just an endless collection of one or two or three line text files that were all, like:

Website Link

Hey, here's that website that that guy sent - https://blah.what/

Eventually I moved from NV to Simplenote because I wanted to have those dumb notes on my phone, and have an easy way to get stuff into my pile of notes on my system at home.

These notes are what have evolved into my org folder, after my conversion from Vim to Emacs a couple years ago.

My org folder is basically like most peoples', I think. Looks like this:

• Archive.org
• Inbox.org
• Writing.org [Essentially a one-note-per-headline Zettle of all writing notes]
• Notes.org [Essentially a one-note-per-headline Zettle of all non-writing notes]
• Quotebox.org [Interesting qutations and snippets]
• Recipes.org
• Shopping.org
• Todo.org
• Project 1.org
• Project 2.org
• Project 3.org
• Project 4.org
• Project 5.org
• Project 6.org

I sync this folder to my cloud service, and use Beorg to get at them on my phone. It's not great, but it's working fine in general. I still haven't found an iOS app that has good full-text search for plaintext files -- like, I had iA Writer recommended to me, and while it does indeed search the full text of my notes, it doesn't take me to the thing I searched for, it just tells me what file it found that in. Since I'm currently using a big-ass-note-file, one-header-per-note system, that's incredibly useless.

Deft, which you mentioned, might be the perfect tool for these kinds of notes, and maybe I'll give it another look -- the last time I tried it was right after I'd switched to Emacs, and it seemed a little weird to set up at the time. That said, there are issues:

Problems

1. Mediocre options for mobile access to notes
2. Can't decide whether to stick with the big-ass-note-file approach, or move to a one-note-per-file approach. Both seem to have their heavy downsides.
3. Too many of my notes are just links to things rather than something in-depth or actionable -- which is mostly a problem with how lazy I've become with takin notes.
4. Does not integrate with the other system (and switching to Deft wouldn't help that, necessarily).

Second System

The second system is what I call the grimoire -- it's basically a collection of reference files and notes and... stuff that I've been growing and curating since I was a kid. A personal library combined with my collection of longer-form notes and essays on topics. [You may have noticed, I tend to write a lot of words, haha].

The grimoire folder used to be this really complicated labyrinth of directory trees, but a few years ago a woman who'd worked as a secretary for 40+ years made fun of me for how I was organizing things, and convinced me to try keeping the folder structure flat as possible.

These days, everyting is organized by one folder per broad topic -- it looks something like this:

~/Grimoire
    - ./CSS Snippets
    - ./Emacs
    - ./Ettiquette
    - ./Idioms
    - ./Poetic Forms
    - ./Poetic Techniques
    - ./Psychology
    - ./Reading Lists
    - ./Zines

And so on to infinity in both directions.

I try to only add folders when I absolutely need them -- when a single concept no longer contains all the stuff, the folders sort of divide like a bacteria. As an example: I've got a folder that used to be just called "Idioms", but has expanded to be "Idioms and Etymology", and will probably split into two folders in the next few years.

Problems

1. No easy way to search the files in full text (grep takes forever, and ag gives me a seg fault when it tries to process the entire folder)
2. No easy way to cross-reference stuff
3. Not everything is in plaintext
4. Mediocre options for mobile access (although, since it's sort of organized by topic, it's not terrible.)

Integrating the Two

I've been thinking about this stuff a lot for the last year or so, but haven't come to any good conclusions -- most of my interest in PIM comes from the practical need to get myself all on the same page with this stuff. That I'm down to only these two systems is a big improvement! But getting down to just one system would be a miracle.

Like everything else, the question is "What are you trying to accomplish here?" and I guess I would say my needs are pretty basic:

1. I want to have a way to find what I'm looking for in all this stuff when I have a question. Whether that means a full-text search or whatever doesn't matter much. But I want an easier way to get from, "Hey, what was that welsh syllabic poetry form...?" to my notes on Englyn poems. Or, more usefully, to be able to look up code snippets I've saved for later use.
2. I want a way to better way to cross-connect this stuff so I can do more interesting things with it. There's a lot of value in being able to visualize the web of connections between ideas and notes and articles -- but I've never been able to figure out how to do it in a robust way.
3. I want to be able to get at this stuff on the go -- both so I can add to the pile when I'm out and about, and so I can answer questions in meetings at work or whatever without having to be tied to the specific computers where I've synced my notes.

The Zettelkasten system immediately seems like a good way to approach all this, but I think it'll require a LOT of change on my part to make it work. If I've understood correctly, the Zettle system would need me to go through the grimoire, and make individual notes from all of the articles and ephemera I've collected over the years -- doing what the very nice, but shirtless, German man in this video describes, but to my own notes and stuff rather than to books.

...okay -- and as prophesied that was a very, very long reply, and I apologize. And I understand if you don't want to dig through that, haha.

Still, I would be really interested to know what sorts of notes you keep, and how you wrangle them into something useful to you. What your workflow is. Anything you feel like sharing would be helpful to me, because obviously I'm just sort of winging it, here, and don't have anyone else around to chew on this stuff with.