Can Dynalist be used as a "Personal Knowledge Management" tool?

If anyone uses Dynalist as his/her PKM tool, I would like to hear about your experience with it.

I wouldn’t use it for that by itself. I would recommend you try Obsidian and Notion. What I find Dynalist excels at is being the triage area for all your atoms of thought. In other words, an outliner. It lets you shuffle things around under different parents, under different parents of parents to get a tree structure. I especially like the move hotkey to quickly get items clumped together where they belong. But if I have a more complex individual project or library of data, I link to an Obsidian page or something. Dynalist somewhat struggles if you have documents that are too big or too many documents. Whereas if you use Obsidian, you can get a graph of everything and quickly move around and it never slows down.

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What sort of struggle may I face if any of my documents is too big or if I accumulate too many documents?

When one document gets too big, the performance will get sluggish, depending how much RAM you have and CPU. This is very rare though. It only happens to people with absurdly huge documents.

There’s no issue with too many documents. Rather the issue is… something else. For some history, Dynalist is inspired by Workflowy. Workflowy is an app that only allows one total document and you put your entire life, all your notes in that one document. Basically the top-level nodes serve the same idea as multiple documents, but the user interface is as if it’s one document. Then along came a new product called Dynalist, which decided to make separate documents. Now the issue there is that the documents don’t work together well. Like if you try to search and something’s in a different document, you’re not going to see it unless you’re in a different search mode. Just little things that make it difficult to work between documents. In my opinion, everyone should just have one document for everything and then everything works together splendidly. But then you run up against the first issue I mentioned, that performance gets sluggish.

Personally, I’ve never had either issue because I only use one document and I use it reasonably without making it absurdly huge. I’m not trying to cram the Library of Congress in here, I’m just trying to put my own notes in a place.

It really depends what your idea of PKM is. If you believe a PKM printed out should be a stack of paper 10 feet tall, then maybe you should use more of a database-like app like Obsidian. Whereas if your idea of PKM is more like mine, where it would only print into a small stack of pages that you could staple together, then Dynalist would work great.

In my edgy and controversial opinion, the people who use PKM to store more reading material than they ever read in their life are insane and need a therapist. But I still love them all.

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Well, Dynalist has 2 search modes. One located in the left sidebar is used to find documents and the other located in the documents is used to search contents in any existing documents. So if I am working on a document and I need to see some contents of other documents, I will just press Ctrl+F, type whatever I am looking for, and then press Ctrl+enter. And if I wanna look for other documents I will just use the Ctrl+O shortcut. So working between documents looks quite simple to me.
The only issue I might face is the lack of a “Multi-tab” option, which is crucial for me. But I still chose “Dynalist” for some reasons and those are:

  1. It is super fast.
  2. Very simple to use.
  3. Outline-based and has the “Toggle” option

The reasons I chose not to use Obisidian are:

  1. It’s very complex.
  2. Not outline-based.
  3. Sometimes a bit laggy and buggy.
  4. And its Bidirectional Linking is completely useless to me as the contents of the “Backlinks” are not editable.