PKM Map of Content

On March 11, 2026, the Yagnipedia PKM section reached critical mass. Ten articles about note-taking tools. Ten covers. Ten roasts of varying tenderness. And somewhere in the wiki-link graph, the articles began to self-organise. By March 12, an eleventh had appeared — not a roast, not a love letter, but a field report from outside a window. The notes are still organising.

Nobody asked for a Map of Content. Nobody created a ticket. Nobody scheduled a sprint. The notes about notes spontaneously developed the need for a note about notes about notes, because this is what happens when you write enough about Personal Knowledge Management — the PKM instinct metastasises, and before you know it you are organising your critique of organisation.

The Lizard considers this page unnecessary. grep PKM ~/Notes/Notes/Yagnipedia/*.md returns the same information in 23 milliseconds. The Lizard is correct. The Lizard is always correct. The page exists anyway, because the notes demanded it, and who are we to argue with notes that have achieved sentience.

The Migration Path

This is one developer’s journey through the PKM landscape, read left to right, top to bottom, regret accumulating with each step:

2010        2019        2020        2020        2021
Evernote ──→ Roam ──→ Obsidian ──→ Logseq ──→ Notion
   │                                              │
   │         2022        2021        2021          │
   └──────── Tana ←── Mem ←──── Apple Notes ←─────┘
               │                     ↑
               │         2022        │ (the 200 notes
               └──→ NotePlan ────────┘  were always here)
                       │
                       ↓
                   text files
                   + Claude            ┌─── Octarine
                   + lg                │    (watching
                   + grep              │    through the
                       │               │    window since
                       ↓               │    2024)
                 you are reading ······┘
                   this page

The endpoint is grep with extra steps. The Lizard has been at this endpoint since 1976. The journey was thirty years and nine tools longer than necessary. The journey was also the point, because without it there would be no encyclopedia, and without the encyclopedia there would be no page for the Lizard to disapprove of.

The Tools

The Origin

• Evernote — The elephant that remembered everything except how to evolve. The golden age (2008-2014), the stagnation, the Electron rewrite, the acquisition. The tool that proved people wanted digital notes and then forgot to keep proving it.

The Revolution

• Roam Research — The tool that changed everything and then watched everyone else ship it. Bidirectional links. Block references. Daily notes. Datalog. The Believer tier. The temple is crumbling but the ideas are permanent.

The Rebuilders

• Obsidian — VSCode for notes. The file is the truth. The twenty plugins are the journey. The graph view is the screensaver. $8/month to sync (local-first btw).

• Logseq — The open-source Roam that stored everything in three languages in a trench coat pretending to be markdown. The database version is coming soon (since 2024).

• Notion — The beautiful corporate headquarters for teams of one who wish they were teams. Backlinks added 2025 (checkbox-complete). No daily notes. But dark mode.

The Quiet Ones

• Apple Notes — The app that won by not trying. The 200 notes that actually matter. The best backup is the one you make without thinking.

• NotePlan — The one that actually works. Built by one, used by one, works for both. The love letter in a series of roasts.

The Experiments

• Mem — The AI-first tool that forgot the notes, the features, and the dark mode. Left for health reasons (eye strain). CSS property count needed to fix it: 1.

• Tana — The most innovative tool since Roam and the most dangerous place for a developer with ADHD. Supertags are amazing. The supermarket closed three hours ago. 100 lines is not enough.

The New Workshop

• Octarine — The one moving so fast it might achieve email before lg does. Built by one, shipping weekly, $79 forever. riclib is watching through the window. The frontmatter parser is not ready for his files. The files are not ready for anything. The observation continues.

The Elder

• Org-mode — The correct answer, locked inside Emacs. Zawinski’s Law Stage 3: Become OS. Admired through the gate. The citizenship application remains unfiled.

The Meta-Article

• Personal Knowledge Management — The species taxonomy. The Hoarder, the Tool Migrant, the Architect, the GTD Purist, the Zettelkasten Evangelist, and the Lizard. The $4 billion industry. riclib’s solution: teach the AI to take notes.

The Pattern

Every tool in this list got something right:

The last column converges: every tool’s failure is a variation of “the simple thing is hard.” Sync is hard (Obsidian). Shipping is hard (Roam). Staying simple is hard (Notion). Being usable is hard (Org-mode). Not truncating at 100 lines is — apparently — also hard (Tana). Parsing frontmatter that has survived thirty migrations is — apparently — also hard (Octarine).

The tool that gets everything right does not exist. The closest approximation is a folder of markdown files, a 30-line Claude skill, and a small (ahem) helper called lg. This is not a tool. It is a stack. It is also grep with extra steps. The Lizard nods.

Measured Characteristics

• PKM tools reviewed: 11
• PKM tools riclib has used: 9 (Org-mode admired from outside the gate, Octarine watched through the window)
• Love letters: 1 (NotePlan)
• Genuine roasts: 8
• Field reports from outside: 1 (Octarine)
• Admiration through a gate: 1 (Org-mode)
• Total migration time: ~6 years
• Total configuration time across all tools: hundreds of hours
• Notes that survived all migrations: 200 (in Apple Notes, where they always were)
• The endpoint: text files + AI + grep
• The Lizard’s position on this MOC: unnecessary
• grep’s opinion: 23ms
• This page’s self-awareness level: concerning

“The notes about notes organised themselves into a note about notes about notes. This is exactly the behaviour the PKM article warned about. The Lizard has one file. The Lizard does not need a Map of Content for one file.”
— The Lizard, who grep’d this page and found it wanting

See Also

Every link above. This is, after all, a Map of Content. Linking to everything is the entire point and the entire problem.