VS Code: Personal Knowledge Store
Personal Knowledge Stores (PKS) are nothing new, and the objective is to store information so we don’t have to worry about remembering things later. When I was younger, I never needed notes. Now I’m older and have far too many projects going on to be effective and keep everything in my brain. I blame responsibility creep instead of age, for now.
Before rolling your own…
Know that there are many available solutions already for this today. Two of the biggest I bump into are Microsoft OneNote and Obsidian. Unlike VS Code, they were purpose built to provide access to your information in a searchable, and organized way. Said more clearly, they were not built with developers in mind, but standard computer users who don’t want to (or care to) deal with a build your own PKS mindset.
OneNote
OneNote is OK. It integrates with SharePoint and Teams, which makes use of the OneNote in a Microsoft shop a decent enough experience. Additionally, it’s installed out of the box on Windows so all you may need to do is search for “OneNote” in the start menu and you’re off to the races. The biggest drawbacks are reliance on the Microsoft ecosystem and no support for Linux.
Obsidian
Obsidian still confuses me as a business. Don’t get me wrong, the product experience is great at what it does…for free. When you start looking into their integration with websites, hosting, or costs for business use I scratch my head. The graph visualization is cool, but not compelling enough for me as someone who can write their own directed graph or install Neo4j. A major plus is it supports all major operating systems, and I think I got it running on FreeBSD too.
Rolling on
Right out of the box, there’s actually a lot of similarities between Visual Studio Code and Obsidian. Both allow you to review files / folders in the application. Both all you to edit MarkDown in the application and review the output.
So let’s identify some of the gaps that quickly come into view:
- There is no export to PDF function in VS Code as there is in Obsidian.
- There is no node visualization functionality.
- There is no canvas feature.
For me personally, I have other tools I like to use for the missing features. Primarily, it’s lucid chart for the canvas features and node visualization. Years as an architect have definitely informed me in those areas, though I realize that not everyone was paid to make pretty charts for large organizations.
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However, exporting MarkDown for others is something I find super impactful because many people don’t like reading it. And for that, I use MARP as my secret sauce.
MARP // MARPIT
Marp is the single most effective tool I have for taking notes and turning them into a presentable solution for others to consume. Because of the way it works, it forces me to put information in my markdown into consumable chunks — as if I was going to present them. While this is not the best format for everything, it works very effectively for many things.
In this screen shot, you can see the MarkDown in the center is being used to automatically generate slides which can be exported to PDF/HTML/PPT as needed without further revision. After exporting, we can see the same slides blown up here in my browser:
For more tips and tricks…
To help you get started, I’ve put together a sample repository in gitlab that has this exact slide layout already written for you. The boilerplate CSS should give you a good idea of where to start to take MARP and really make it yours. In addition to some boiler plate, I have placed additional goodies in how to structure your VS Code driven digital brain.
