howm-manual

Also for anyone interested in trying Howm the guide for it was recently updated. https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual The cool thing about Howm is that it's note-taking and task management for lazy people. It predates org-mode (but it also works with it nowadays) and has a distinct way of linking notes by way of go-to and come-from links, think saved search and automatic backlink respectively. Also the way tasks are displayed and surfaced is pretty neat too, the guide/manual goes more in-depth but if you find stuff like org-agenda too complex you'll appreciate Howm's way of tracking and managing tasks.

I recently discovered “Howm” [1] (the “Handy Own Wiki Mode”), which is a personal wiki system for Emacs. Surprisingly, it is slightly older than Org-mode – although it now works great with Org files – and is still actively maintained by the author. After giving it a try, I now feel that I prefer it’s simplicity over newer systems like Org Roam and Denote, while having some similarities to e.g. Deft (like fulltext as-you-type search). It also offers some unique features of its own, like “comefrom links” as opposed to conventional “goto links”, and that most Howm links are actually just syntactic sugar for searches. The submitted link [2] is to a third-party documentation of the project, which I found more useful than the official documentation to get started :) [1]: https://kaorahi.github.io/howm/ [2]: https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manu

I have recently started to play around with the lightweight Emacs mode, "HOWM" which was written about 20 years ago by a Japanese author, who still maintains it today. The howm-mode shows you a summary view, comprised of information (just the title/heading) from the (configurable) last 20 notes you have made. Everything goes under ~/howm/YYYY/MM e.g. ~/howm/2024/01 for notes I am making this month. It has a simple way to enter schedule, todo, deadline, etc. which it shows just below the header that has single-key commands (s for case-insensitive searching, c to create a new note, etc.) for searching, navigation, new notes. The genius of howm is that you can write and have very simple back and forward links to any file, URL, or tag, any kind of text etc., and you write "fragments" that is, whatever the smallest unit of text you want - it j