A friend pointed me at this as an open source alternative to Obsidian [0], which has been discussed previously here [1].

[0]: https://obsidian.md

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33190433

As always, the question must be asked: Why this instead of Org mode?

Why does every tool need to justify itself against an arbitrary program that many people have never used?

Why emacs at all? Why use org mode in emacs?

I'm not against it; I've just never used it.

Why use Emacs? Why use Org mode?

For the first, because some of us like that we don't have to change applications just to do different tasks. Yeah, kind of a silly reason, but there you go, why Emacs has packages for almost anything you can think of.

Why Org mode? Because it's good and it's already here, and like Emacs itself, it covers everything. Once you've used it for a while, every other way of organizing information looks like half-baked attempts to provide maybe a third to half of what Org already does.

Also, I'm primarily asking the question because it's something that always comes up whenever these kinds of productivity tools get posted on HN. It's essentially a meme. Foam does look pretty interesting, although porting everything in Org over to it would be somewhat frustrating...

Thanks for the reasonable answer.

I should probably give Emacs a try, since I’m overhauling my knowledge handling systems right now.

I'll just warn you that the experience isn't for everyone. But if LISP and the feeling of living in a terminal window's your thing, I think you'll enjoy!

I’ve never done anything with LISP actually, so that could be interesting.

My background is in some esoteric minicomputers and Python plus a bit of C more recently.

Yeah, from time to time I hear about great features of emacs and lament that I don't use it. But I usually revert to the state of mind in which I am grateful that God gave me a brain for which vim is the more natural fit.