Annotate-in-Place Notes with Emacs and org-remark | Charlie Holland's Blog

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Annotate-in-Place Notes with Emacs and org-remark

Annotate-in-Place Notes with Emacs and org-remark

Table of Contents

1. About   notes annotations emacs orgRemark

2. The Video: org-remark in Action   video demo

3. The Problem with Modern Digital Note-Taking   notes problem

3.1. The Context-Switching Tax

3.2. Source Amnesia and Note Amnesia

3.3. No Signal on Revisit

3.4. Memory Anxiety

4. Annotate-in-Place: The Pattern   pattern

5. What Existing Tools Get Right (and Wrong)   readwise hypothesis

6. org-remark in Brief   orgRemark emacs

6.1. Pens and Metadata   pens metadata

7. Extending org-remark to New Modes   extension elfeed wombag pubmed

8. A Daily Review Workflow   review

9. What org-remark Gives You   benefits orgRemark

10. Caveats   caveats

11. Closing: The Pattern Is the Point   closing

12. TLDR   tldr

1. About   notes annotations emacs orgRemark

Figure 1: JPEG produced with DALL-E 3

I'm like most people when it comes to reading and note-taking.

Whether I'm new to a subject or fluent in it, I find myself devouring massive helpings of the seemingly infinite corpus of relevant text online, clamouring for some way to annotate, reason about, and synthesize that information.

Regardless of my level of mastery in a given subject, I've found that the rate of my information consumption has outpaced the capabilities of my note-taking system.

My dysfunctional note-taking process has been plagued by 2 main pain points:

context switching (from the source content to the notebook)

tenuous connections (between the source content and the notebook).

These issues have imposed an unnecessary friction on my learning process, and so I feel compelled to demonstrate my current workflow, which I find to be simple and cognitively ergonomic. In this post I want to introduce the specific but very generalizable pattern that enables my new workflow, annotate-in-place, and one elegant implementation of it in Emacs via nobiot's org-remark.

What makes this pattern so elegant to me is the familiarity of its experience. I don't know about you, but I've been annotating books and taking notes with pencils and pens for almost my entire life, and this is often the most engaging and soul-lifting experience. There is a je ne sais quoi in this interaction that makes me feel closer to, if not part of, the thing I'm reading. This is a physical annotate-in-place, and it works beatifully.

I've been long searching for a cognitive bridge between the ergonomics of putting pen to source text with the infinite flexibility of a software solution. annotate-in-place is the pattern that provides that bridge, and org-remark in Emacs is one implementation of that pattern. With it, digital note taking feel as intuitive and ergonmic to me as note taking on a physical medium.

As a more cognitive benefit, I've found that annotate-in-place's reduction on the memory and organization burden of note-taking let's my mind expand into the internet, unincumbered by any friction or worry. That's a great feeling!

The first half of the post is about the pattern, in the abstract, of annotate-in-place. The meat and potatoes is a demo of org-remark in Emacs across a handful of contexts. I wrap up with some caveats of my current approach, and some hypotheses on why this approach is relevant beyond Emacs.

2. The Video: org-remark in Action   video demo

The upper-right of my Emacs (in the tab-bar) shows the keybindings and command names I am invoking, so you can map what you see onto your own configuration.

3. The Problem with Modern Digital Note-Taking   notes problem

We builders are often taught that coupling is bad, bad, bad…. But in some rare cases it makes perfect sense.

Most digital note-taking approaches decouple the note from the source. That's bad decoupling in my opinion. Whether digital or physical, I typically read in one app and write in another. Pure on-book annotation is an exception, but once I factor in something like a 'knowledge base' (a personal notes graph — think Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, org-roam, denote), I'm dealing with decoupled artifacts: the source artifact (abstractly, the 'site') and an annotation artifact (abstractly, the 'notebook').

In this context 'sites' can be a webpage, a book, or even your own notebook; and 'notebooks' can be a digital note app, or a physical piece of paper.

Everyone reading this (I hope) understands the pickle in this decoupling, but here are a few issues that stand out for me:

3.1. The Context-Switching Tax

The friction of this is small on a per-action basis, but it adds up, and tragically punishes the virtuous act of noticing. Noticing, as passive as it sounds, is out intellectual leverage as special humans, and I believe it should be met with as...