Note-taking on Emacs with howm package

Sukhovskii

Greetings to the community!

I'd like to introduce you to yet another way to organize a knowledge base in Emacs. This is the howm package by Kazuyuki Hiraoka. Package available on Melpa.

I've been using howm daily for a year and a half now, and I can confidently say that it is a simple and elegant solution for taking notes. Howm, much like "The Archive," utilizes links as a search trigger, among other similarities.

The package is almost 21 years old, but Hiraoka continues to actively support it. I've spent the past year creating a guide for howm, and I'm glad to show you what I've come up with.

The tutorial on howm is free and you can find it in English and Russian here:
https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual

Happy holidays! 🎅 🍻

ctietze

@Sukhovskii I've looked at Howm about once a year to see if it's approach 'clicks', but so far no luck If you find yourself using Howm for a while and could show a bit more about your setup, that'd be great!

Sukhovskii

@ctietze It may sound strange in the context of a conversation about Emacs, but I am not a tinkerer by nature. I don’t enjoy additional work, so my setup is very close to the original one.

I've changed just a few things:

;; Path to the system files
(setq howm-home-directory "~/howm/")
(setq howm-directory "~/howm/")
(setq howm-keyword-file (expand-file-name ".howm-keys" howm-home-directory))
(setq howm-history-file (expand-file-name ".howm-history" howm-home-directory))

;; Keep one window after "1" key in the summary buffer.
(setq howm-view-keep-one-window t)

;; Search optimisation
(setq howm-view-use-grep t)  ;; use external grep
(setq howm-menu-refresh-after-save nil)
(setq howm-menu-expiry-hours 2)  ;; cache menu N hours
(setq howm-menu-file "0000-00-00-000000.txt")  ;; don't *search*