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.
the rest stays in memory. what you do not pin does not follow you. tomorrow’s page starts empty regardless of what you wrote today. that reads like a cleanup feature and it is not. a page that keeps yesterday in view is a page you write for posterity, so the editor voice arrives before the thought is finished. an empty page lowers the stakes to nothing, because nothing you write today is asking to be revisited tomorrow. leaving the rest looks like doing nothing, and it 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 does not carry the rest forward.
one detail we only noticed after being pointed at it: howm’s reminders already sort by floating. todos float up slowly, deadlines float up fast as they approach, reminders drift down slowly. two people reached the same picture for the same intuition, that attention has a water line and most things belong under it. in howm you choose the sort per item. in shizumu staying under is the default, and pinning is the one choice that overrides it.
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, where nothing drops out of view. that is not a contradiction but the default turned off, by choice, 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 in view, you will stop seeing. nothing is deleted, memory holds it and search will still find it if you know to ask, but you will not know to ask, and that is the actual trade: not losing the words, losing the reason to go back for them. in exchange the writing is easier to start, more honest while it happens, and the pins, the part you meant to keep, stay small enough to return to on their own.
write to think. pin what matters. trail what continues. everything else stays in memory, searchable.