Exploring Emacs with Abe Peters
Plus a roundup of Obsidian, notion and craft ideas.
Hi friends, I hope you’ve had a great week.
I’ve enjoyed seeing the navigators community really come to life as more people have joined. I’d love to see some more readers over there. It’s not as Obsidian nor PKM focused but more on what we take notes on. For example there are channels on book reviews, bible study and pray.
I’ve got some really exciting video plans for the next week as well as resources page coming (Possibly using Notion!) and an extra surprise! But in the meantime, let’s dive in.
Passage
“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
Abe Peters - Emacs Note taker extraordinaire
Could you Introduce yourself to anyone who doesn’t know you?
My name is Abe. What’s most important about me is that I’m a Christian. I was born again in 2003 when I was 11 years old. Next, I am one of four boys. I’m third in line. After that, I’ve been married for 8 years and we have 2 boys. Now I live in Northern Colorado. Right now I’m doing some online entrepreneurial stuff (read: I don’t know what I’m doing) and I’m working with a church in the Denver area on a part-time basis.
What brought you to start taking connected bible notes?
When I was in college getting a B.A. in Biblical studies, I remember taking courses and getting to the end just to have no idea on how to use my notes to write papers or take comprehensive exams. Then, when I took other courses, I would remember something about something from another course I just took and think, “I wish there was a way to take better notes!” I experiment a lot with note-taking. I used OneNote with simple hierarchical notes. Evelyn Woods’ Slash Recall Notes. Sketch Notes. I tried experimenting with analog and digital tech, but nothing fit right. I watched Matthew Everhard’s video on Jonathan Edward’s Miscellanies and saw a lot of potential. But eventually I wanted to know how people took notes without a computer. I found a few cool ideas from Umberto Eco’s notecards and Ryan Holiday’s commonplace book. Eventually, I landed on Luhman’s Zettelkasten system.
After trying to wrap my head around the Zettelkasten system, I found that Emacs was a program where you could create a zettelkasten system for free. After a while of thinking and researching how to build a good system for Bible notes, I realized I could not just connect notes to each other, but also connect the notes to the biblical text itself and create my own study bible that way.
Since I’ve started studying the Bible this way, I’ve been able to connect ideas quicker across the books of the Bible, plus, I trust the system that I can find the notes I’ve created in a meaningful context. I used to love studying the Bible, but I kept thinking, “how can I better store this information so I can bring it up again when it’s meaningful?” Now that my notes are connected, studying feels like I’m building up a whole, connected system, instead of small project based notes that I don’t “know” about each other.
You use Emacs for your notes, why do you use it over other apps?
I’ve already talked about the other apps that I’ve used. It started out with OneNote. And I waffled back and forth from digital and analogy notes. I used typewriters, fountain pens, Notion, Text-To-Speech, and Powerpoint.
I was about to install Scrivener for a trial but I always like to see if there’s a free alternative. I saw this video and saw that I wanted to use Vim or Emacs. After I found the package (think extension, like Chrome extensions) Zetteldeft, I used that for a bit. It was great, but Deft, which Zetteldeft was built off of, had a very slow to load up notes. Then I found org-roam. It is built to mimic some of Roam Research’s main features. For notes, it was the best thing I found.
On top of taking great notes, Emacs is very customizable. It has great export features. And it’s an old program with a lot of support.
Do you use your notes app for other uses apart from bible notes?
Like I said, it’s great for exporting. I’ve made my last Bible class booklet with Emacs using LaTeX with org-mode. I don’t expect many people to understand this stuff because Emacs is known for becoming its own operating system. You can email, tweet, browse the web, rss, blog, write a book, read PDFs and epubs, and manage your tasks with it.
What is one tip you’d give to someone new to taking linked notes?
I’m not an Emacs evangelist, I know it has a difficult learning curve. If you’re not into learning a whole new way of using computers and having your config files break Emacs every once in a while, don’t use it. I always suggest Obsidian.md.
So the tip I would give someone new is the same tip that I need to remember. Niklas Luhman, the creator of the Zettelkasten system called his septic tank. The purpose of this metaphor was to say it wasn’t a pretty thing. It was disorganized. So the advice is this: get started and let the Zettelkasten be an intellectual journal. Let it be messy and disorganized. After some time, there will be links created that will generate new ideas, but that’s not until you’ve fed the system notes for long enough.
Where can people connect with you?
I have a youtube channel. Also on Odysee. Anyone is welcome to email me at hey@abepeters.com. Also, I have a website abepeters.com. I don’t have a good deposit of articles there yet, but I will soon. I have a Github account, too that has the WEB (World English Bible) and KJV in both Markdown and .org (for Emac’s org-mode).
Don’t be afraid to reach out. If you wanna talk the Bible, note-taking, Emacs, writing, or something along those lines, don’t hesitate.
Links
Craft updates
Craft's latest update has added iOS 15 support and some important web app updates.
A Beginner’s Guide to Craft: Documents, Pages, and Blocks
Josh Ginter takes us on a tour of Craft and how he uses it to take notes.
The best way to use commentaries - Logos
How should you use commentaries in your Bible study? This logos blog provides three ideas.
Obsidian plugin - Random structural diary
This plugin gives you random diary prompts from a larger collection. You can set the exact numbers for each day to tailor it to your liking. I can see this idea being possible for other PKM tools with a bit of automation magic like shortcuts on iOS.
What’s in your PKM?
I hopped on a Racket with my friend Chad to discuss what’s in our Obsidian vaults. I might add the “what was the last note you took” question to my interview questions.
10 Public Notion Templates You Can Magically Copy
Some inspiration for you Notion users out there. But maybe there's something you can take for another app like Obsidian?
Support
It’s the first week of the month so I’m sharing how you can support this newsletter and my YouTube Channel.
Firstly, thanks to everyone who has paid to download the Obsidian Bible Knowledge Management starter kit (even though you could get it for free). It’s been a real blessing.
If you don’t need the kit but still want to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee (I’ll literally share a picture of every coffee I buy thanks to one of these).
OR if you are a logos user, consider using my logos partner code to download the free book of the month.
Thanks for the interview, man!