Comment by mikro2nd

As someone quite deeply into the "tools for thought" thing... I hardly ever worry about the meta-task. I just make notes tied in to one or other index page, all of which (there are only a few more than a dozen or so) tie into a higher-level index page. Given the search capabilities of a decent personal-wiki-like there's not really much call to arrange, file, tag, classify notes.

I use Zim Desktop for my notes because it's simple and (precisely) because it stays the hell out of my way and lets me focus on my own writing. Over several years of doing this I've tried quite a few other tools, but none manages to hit the sweet-spot of simplicity and affordance I find in Zim. Roam, Notion and other web-based tools are just a fucking annoyance to me, being clunky to use and offering little since I have no need to access my notes across multiple devices, nor any use for publishing/"sharing" my personal notebook or pages with others. If I do want to do that I can (and do) just copy the relevant material over to my (static) blog, `git push` and the job's done.

(Edit to add: the "Backlinks" plugin is vital for using Zim for this purpose.)

Music/video is much more challenging in that regard: our computers' capabilities for searching those is pitiful, but then... keeping bookmarks to such stuff is hardly the use-case for a personal-note tool. It's for keeping your own thoughts and observations, not for bookmarking random blatherings.