About Imatal, my notes management system (Blaugust2026/2)

History

In 2023 I started using Notion after seeing someone use it online, I liked the amount of customisation that could be done to a Notion... space... (in Obsidian it's called a "vault", idk what Notion calls it... maybe nothing) so I made my own vault and transcribed some of my notebook entries into it, but I stopped using it after a while because the concept of having a digital notebook wasn't really... I wouldn't say "unknown" because I already had a notes folder with some plaintext files in 2021, but I already stopped using that 2 years prior.

What was I saying? oh right, so I had notebooks earlier and I did write in them (sometimes) but the idea of keeping all of my notes digitally wasn't really on my mind at all.

Until I saw a video by CyanVoxel, who uses a program called Obsidian to write and manage notes, and that was so cool to me that I decided I need to have my own 'vault' as well, which I called "nope" (idk why). I basically replicated the entire CyanVoxel setup for my own vault, I used the JetBrains Mono font, I had those coloured categories, but most of all I took that note ID system which I thought was a really cool idea.

So that lasted from May to July of 2024... and while I did make some more styles for certain notes, at that point I had become fascinated by another idea I had, which was to write all my notes directly in HTML. I mean just imagine it, the amount of control over the document that's possible by using HTML... so in another thing I had, which was called extraorganisedthings, I made my digital notebook in HTML.

That system lasted until October of 2024, which is when I saw this video on the "By Default" channel. In that video, among lots of other things, they talk about how they used Emacs and Org-mode and once again, I was so hooked that I tried to make my own system right away, modelled similarly to what the video shows.

So on the 15th of October I made... emacsnotes. As you can tell, I was really good with naming these... :D

This was actually not the first time I ever used Emacs, in 2021 I saw someone use a Doom Emacs setup in the unixporn subreddit. Though I couldn't really figure out how to use it because and at that time I had never even used Vim before, so when I came back to it 3 years later and having permanently switched to Arch Linux at the time, I could much more easily grasp the usage of Emacs (Doom Emacs that is, but I eventually got used to native Emacs keybinds as well).

But remember when I said that the HTML notebook lasted "until" October of 2024? Yeah in reality I kept using it even after I made emacsnotes and I even upgraded it into whatI called enwnotes ("new" spelt wrong). That HTML document control was still too cool for me not to use it, so I had two sets of digital notebooks: emacsnotes with Org and enwthing with HTML.
UNTIL I was so dissatisfied with my organisation of emacsnotes and the fact that I had two systems for it that shortly after the 1-year-anniversary of emacsnotes I decided that I needed to rework the entire thing right now.

The new system would have my notes from all of the previous systems and it would have a much better ID structure than emacsnotes and I called this system Imatal. The name was something I threw together in my head from the words 今 (ima) and tal (from uxntal), (at least I think that's where it came from, and I guess the etymology would be something like "now language").

Structure

I wrote so much about how it came to be now but I haven't even mentioned how it works...
Content in Imatal is sorted into categories and subcategories, all of which (along with many notes) have an alphanumeric ID number. When I created nope (also later renamed to nop3 btw) I thought it was a really cool idea to have those numbers so it would be easy to tell which (sub)category a given note belongs to, but I do realise that I don't really use this system at all, but I keep it around anyway because I still like it and it's not much of a hassle to work with.

Imatal functions similarly to a website as it has indexes and hyperlinks for navigations through notes. I also have a CLI tool that functions like a static site generator to export everything to HTML after which it does work just like a website.

In the "Journal" category there are "Diary", "Notebook" and "Notepad" subcategories, all of which have a different purpose but all use timestamps instead of IDs for notes, and all of those notes are sorted per month per year.

• the "Diary" (ID 1100), as the name says, is for daily reflective entries
• the "Notebook" (ID 1200) is for random entries and I also have a "quick/short notes" file in each of them which are for what some people are using Twitter for
• the "Notepad" (ID 1201) was created because I couldn't figure out where I should place my notes, whether it should be in the "Notebook" or any of the other categories. Here I create an entry for a whole day and just write whatever is on my mind.

Since June of 2025 I've put metadata in my "Notebook" notes such as location, weather, host computer, mood, tags,

Currently there are 4 text formats in Imatal: Org, Markdown, Imatal ROFF (ItROFF) and Typst. I have multiple because (1) I imported my Obsidian notes in there which are Markdown and I didn't want to convert all of them with the amount of HTML bloat they have, and (2) because I want to have options even if I do think Org is superiour to many formats (though Typst is very interesting to me and I might try it out more in the future). Technically there are 5 because I didn't convert the enwthing notes, rather I put them into export blocks, but those are still within Org files.

Imatal ROFF if a ROFF-like format that I created because I thought it would probably be really easy and not take long to make a converter for it when I looked it up on Wikipedia... to which I was right and it took me about an hour to get a very bare-bones one working.

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The thing with systems like this is that people often try to use them to be more productive, they think they can start doing more when they start using a system like this but they usually don't and end up switching to yet another system... I personally never had much of a goal with these, especially not being productive. Searching for systems to be more productive is often counter-productive as it takes more time to try and perfect a system than it does to actually use it.

I've been using Imatal for almost a year now and including emacsnotes it's 2 years. At this point in time, I am under the impression that this is the ultimate system... for me. Also apparently people sometimes call this a PKMS (Personal Knowledge Management System), but many of those I've seen online tend to import a lot of external media into theirs which to me adds a ton of unnecessary bloat and I don't like that, so I prefer to call it a "note(s) management system" instead.

Oh yeah I also have 2 personal wikis in here, one for the real world and one for my worldbuild, which have turned out to be incredibly useful.

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I think that about does it for this post, it's about as long as I thought it would be and I could go on and on about it but I'll put any further information in future posts.