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Imatal → History

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(blog post taken as a base)

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").