Love this! I too got the sense of growing through phases via fiction. And your comment is surprisingly similar to what I said about War and Peace recently here! https://kite.link/Fiction
I wrote this article. Thanks very much for posting it here and for everyone who read/commented/corrected me :) It's also great to hear about the other projects in this area, so thanks again!
Thanks for mentioning this! I did have a look at that software but couldn't get it to run on my Linux machine. To be fair, I didn't try very hard.
I also figured, since what I started was just a lightweight tree of plaintext markdown files, that it would be easy to integrate into another comparable system later on.
Agreed! That's why I went for markdown in implementing it for myself.
Handwriting definitely helps, but a lot of it in this system is done during reading (or just general life), which Ahrens calls "literature notes". Ahrens has a theory that handwriting forces paraphrasing, which he views as important to learning. Anyway, I handwrite all that, then there's a later stage of integrating the relevant info into the system.
For me, searchability and accessibility, plus backup (I write a ton on paper already and I'm a bit worried about losing notebooks) makes it worth the digital step.
I.e., it makes you better at what you're trying to do even in the absence of the tool. To me, the main benefit of the system is that it encourages relational thinking.