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2023-01-31

Tags: hackers-town look

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Emulate tldr instead of man in your notes

a bullet point is a note given the right tag

TLDR

Emulate tldr instead of man in your notes.

I still do PKM wrong. Keep your notes small. Stick with one tool. Stay focused. Yep, none of that.

But I have learned that emulating man page style isn’t great. I have big notes on commands with every option, every subcommand, and every subcommand’s option.

Then I’d end up searching online how to do a thing. Because I wasn’t using a searchable style.

Few months ago I had a moment of enlightenment. Most of what I want in my knowledge garden is to track processes — how to do a specific thing. Why not make the notes reflect that?

Use clear language directly relevant to the task at hand. Tag them appropriately with a key tag like “process”. You do end up with a lot of notes — or a lot of bullet points, if you use an outliner like Logseq.

Code Sample 
    - Use Rclone to pull *from* a Dropbox folder #process
	- ```sh
	  rclone sync dropbox:Settings ~/Dropbox/Settings
	  ```
- Use Rclone to push *to* a Dropbox folder #process
	- ```sh
	  rclone sync ~/Dropbox/Settings dropbox:Settings
	  ```

But they will be easier to find a few months later when all you can remember is “something something Rclone Dropbox.”.

Logseq search results with example bullets at top of the list

I had these particular processes in the main page for Rclone, but most are scattered throughout my journal pages. It makes no difference, since I use the tag consistently.

Activity Log

hackers.town: 2023-01-31 Tue 14:56

@genehack Still ticks me off so many things Perl set a great example for and nobody even thinks to look in their language because the syntax is a little squiggly.

hackers.town: 2023-01-31 Tue 20:35

Because I spend most of my code time in Python, this is the first thing I see when I look at most other programming languages.

lots of nested closing parentheses, square brackets, and curly braces

hackers.town: 2023-01-31 Tue 20:39

Think I might go play with some Haskell instead.

hackers.town: 2023-01-31 Tue 20:49

@montag I’ll admit, sometimes Lisp is just the thing. But I’ve never seen Lisp used for work code, so I haven’t had a chance to be properly mad at it yet.

hackers.town: 2023-01-31 Tue 20:52

@montag That’s why I love my whitespace-sensitive languages. They’re a headache EVERY time wait hang on let me start over