most note apps ask, before you have had the thought, where the thought goes. which notebook, which tag, which folder. you answer with a guess and the guess is filed alongside the thought forever.
shizumu asks nothing. there is a page, today’s date, and one line for what matters right now.
the model has four moves.
think by writing. you rarely know exactly what you think until you try to say it. writing the sentence is what makes it clear, and that happens before you decide whether to keep the file. the tools stay close enough not to interrupt it: type / for a table, a chart, an outline, a block of code, type @ for a trail, a pin, a reference. keeping is a separate question, and a smaller one than the software usually implies.
keep by pinning. a pinned line survives the day and the page it came from. a pin is not the thinking, it is a pointer back into it. six months later it hands you the place where you had the thought, and standing there again is usually enough. your thinking happens on the page. the pins are where you left it.
trail by choosing. most days are not part of anything. some are, a project, a job search, anything you will come back to tomorrow. putting a page on that trail is not filing, it is asking what you already pinned there to meet you on the page. that is the other half of the pin promise: the pins are where you left it, and choosing the trail is how you get back.
let the rest sink. what you do not pin goes. that reads like a cleanup feature and it is not. a page that keeps everything is a page you write for posterity, so the editor voice arrives before the thought is finished. a page that sinks lowers the stakes to nothing. sink looks like the passive verb and does the most work.
what this owes to howm
howm is an emacs mode by kazuyuki hiraoka, maintained for two decades, whose motto is write fragmentarily and read collectively. it removes the filing question entirely: you never name a note or choose where it lives, and everything rests on full text search, to the point that its links are described as shortcuts to grep.
shizumu shares that ground. there is no filing question here either, and memory is one search across every page, every pin, every trail, not sorted into separate notebooks first. read collectively is the same idea under a different name.
the two part company on the second half. howm solved the cost of keeping, so keep everything and let retrieval sort it out. shizumu questions the obligation to keep. howm defers the decision about what matters to reading time, shizumu makes a cheap version of it at writing time and accepts that the rest is gone.
one detail we only noticed after being pointed at it: howm’s reminders already sort by floating and sinking. todos float slowly, deadlines float rapidly as they approach, reminders sink slowly. two people reached the same verb for the same intuition, that attention has a water line and most things belong under it. in howm the sinking is a sort order and the file stays. in shizumu it is real.
the exception
most trails are discrete: a fresh page each day, past ones read-only in memory. some threads keep going: a book, a research question, a company. those get continuous trails, one living document you add to over months, with no sinking. that is not a contradiction but a refusal of sinking you choose, once, for one thing. the default pile happens because nobody decided. a trail happens because you did.
the trade
some things you would have kept, you will lose. in exchange the writing is easier to start, more honest while it happens, and the kept slice stays small enough to return to.
write to think. pin what matters. trail what continues. the rest sinks.