by DerWOK on 7/3/20, 1:24 PM with 261 comments
by bloopernova on 7/3/20, 1:45 PM
I'll have to download this and give it a try, and compare it to my current workflow.
(I use org-roam on Emacs. I'm not sure if people are sick of org-mode and Emacs being mentioned on HN? I worry about becoming the stereotype of "how do you tell if someone is a Vegan (or uses Emacs)?" "Don't worry, they'll tell you". I don't want to derail any discussion though!)
For those of you wondering about Zettelkasten and knowledge management, I suggest you start by reading "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens: https://takesmartnotes.com/ and https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34507927-how-to-take-...
by lifeisstillgood on 7/3/20, 2:27 PM
1. If we have time to enter something into a knowledge base of any kind - then we have time to just jot it on a piece of paper.
2. If we dont have time (or think it is important at that moment) then what solves the problem for us is not a knowledge base, but search.
You see the thing about Google and Facebook etc, is that if they were collecting all this information about me, and it was treated like medical information about me it would be far more useful to me (and far less useful to Advertisers).
I want a web browser that remembers every single page I have visited (#) and then lets me search them. Then someone could write a spaced reminder thingy for me - spent more than 5 minutes on a web page did he - he will want to refresh that page in 2 weeks and then 4 months.
Yes, knowledge bases are excellent for clearly defined study efforts - like y'know, university, but for the rest of life, explicit note taking is a cost that we need some activation energy barrier for.
Put it this way, once upon a time I had a study book for a new programming language, and i took notes of interesting examples on a ring binder. But the last time I learnt a new language I just relied on Google finding me the relevant StackOverflow pages - my cost/benefit line had changed.
(And notes just got dumped into a text file.)
(#) Ok maybe not those pages
by unsungNovelty on 7/3/20, 3:04 PM
OpenSource powaaaaa! :)
by dmytton on 7/3/20, 2:48 PM
The key for me is a) plain text files I can manage myself i.e. no database or mandatory custom sync; b) markdown.
Apps will come and go. You might decide to switch platforms and maybe a new editor will come along sometime. This means you want a format that can be opened by anything (plain text) but with lightweight markup that the editor can parse to make it look nice, but you can also parse with your eyes and get a reasonable sense of the document structure (markdown).
Then it's all about search. There's no point making notes if you can't find them. This is where something more than Markdown - that allows you to link notes - is handy. It's what is appearing more and more in the likes of Roam, Obsidian, etc.
I ultimately chose iA Writer on macOS because it is lightweight and really nicely designed, plus has good native support for Markdown. I sync using OneDrive but you can use anything because they're all individual files. iA Writer is also native, and I find most Electron apps to be slow and/or buggy. There are exceptions e.g. VS Code, but I prefer native where possible.
by wooptoo on 7/3/20, 4:05 PM
by codr7 on 7/3/20, 3:01 PM
Add Magit and you're good to go:
https://github.com/magit/magit
Emacs is a quirky beast, but these two packages alone make it worth the effort to learn.
by sanchitnevgi on 7/3/20, 2:14 PM
by darkstarsys on 7/3/20, 5:00 PM
Yes, it's totally vendor locked in and I do hate that. And no syntax highlighting for code is annoying. Lack of markdown is a pain. And it's bug-ridden and closed source.
But I've been using it for my work daily journal and knowledge capture for a few years now, and it's so fluid and easy to jot down or scribble a quick note and find it later that it's hard for me to imagine going back to a basic Markdown editor. It's the closest thing I've found to a searchable paper lab notebook.
And btw I'm a hardcore Emacs user for the last 40 years. Org mode is great, but for me, OneNote kills it in expressiveness and fluidity of idea capture and recall.
If someone makes a Markdown editor that supports pen/tablet ink drawing and multiple text blocks on a page, I'd be interested.
by black_puppydog on 7/3/20, 3:29 PM
For Zettelkasten (and research more generally) Stroll [2] is a flavour of TiddlyWiki that has many of the features you'd like, including (most crucially for me) backlinks.
Edit: the reason I brought up TiddlyWiki here is because I tried Zettlr and while I see how some people would like it, I certainly didn't.
by douglaswlance on 7/3/20, 2:29 PM
by jtanderson on 7/3/20, 4:38 PM
So... this looks like something that could be really great! But there's a lot of friction still to having it get out of the way and let me be organized.
by eblanshey on 7/3/20, 3:45 PM
I was really surprised when I discovered it, as I've been looking for the "perfect" note-taking system for a while and VNote was never mentioned. It checks all my boxes: in-place preview of markdown, is open source, automatically copies images to your notes directory, has ability to add file attachments, is customizable with different themes, is programmer-friendly (has VIM-mode), and it's native (no Electron!) And it looks great with the dark theme. It doesn't lock you in to its software as in the end, it's just markdown files and media files.
It doesn't have Zettelkasten support, but it does do tagging and its search capabilities are comprehensive (includes regex search.)
I am not affiliated with the project -- just a happy user :)
by maddyboo on 7/3/20, 3:23 PM
by tifadg1 on 7/3/20, 2:49 PM
* tables (2 or 3 columns depending on type, often using sort by column 1 or column 1+2 to keep relevant information grouped);
* preset formatting for different styles (snippets, commands);
* navigation using ToC (on a sideway navigation pane which is always visible);
* auto-generating anki flashcards from the content with no modifications;
* inserting external media;
I've used different methods to keep a single synchronized copy depending on work tech restrictions, i.e. nfs over ssh, sshfs, vpn via vm. Nowadays working from home I just keep everything locally.
What are the selling points to drop all that and move to something else?
by estacado on 7/3/20, 11:51 PM
by wenc on 7/3/20, 2:17 PM
Would it be correct to say that most of these tools are identical to Wiki software with one exception: the ability to see "what linked to this"?
by Grumbledour on 7/7/20, 7:11 PM
- No title bar makes using the window harder than it needs to be.
- Huge symbols I have to hover over to see what they do + a hamburger menu. A traditional menu would be easier to use for me at least.
- Speaking of hover, whats with the weird, animated back-button for folders that when it appears overlaps other elements?
- Font sizes. Really, they seem to big even for me as a visually impaired person
- General non-nativeness. That Options dialog as a website modal is just weird and jumps around when switching categories.
I don't mean to be to negative here, maybe I am just getting old, but this really seems not to be my cup of tea, though apart from the UI, I really like the idea and the use of pandoc/latex, YAML Frontmatter, saving as just files etc.
If this had a more traditional UI and would use less ressources it would come pretty close to a note taking app I often thought about but was to lazy to try my hand at myself.
by DerWOK on 7/3/20, 3:27 PM
by sradman on 7/3/20, 1:52 PM
by I_am_tiberius on 7/3/20, 3:29 PM
by scribu on 7/3/20, 2:14 PM
If I didn't care about sync, I would use org-roam or some Vim plugin, personally.
by bbx on 7/3/20, 5:37 PM
Underneath, the data structure would remain straightforward Markdown. So the data wouldn't be stored as separate blocks; the moving would act similarly to Sublime Text's "Swap Line Up/Down".
by BasilPH on 7/4/20, 2:47 PM
It visualizes the graph and calculates some stats. I find it useful to track the growth of my Zettelkasten, but also to find notes and components that are unconnected to the rest of the graph.
I built it to scratch my own itch, but I'm always happy to get feedback.
by rvz on 7/3/20, 3:43 PM
I just looked at the apps I currently have open and it appears that I have the following running: VSCode, Docker, Slack, Notion, WhatsApp, Discord, Riot, Chrome (70+ Tabs), Skype, and Figma.
I wondered if my Macbook could tolerate another electron app being installed or if I can open another one without grinding my Macbook to a halt. But again I don't think such apps can even scale with other apps running in the background.
by bluenose69 on 7/3/20, 5:58 PM
by bluenose69 on 7/3/20, 6:38 PM
My scheme does not offer me a nice GUI, but I prefer to see simple text anyway, and I like how vimwiki lets me navigate through my cross-linked notes without my fingers leaving the home keys. Markdown permits images, etc., and if I want to see them I can just open a terminal to a subdirectory and use pandoc.
I don't see a way in vimwiki to get a "what links to this page" item, which I imagine an application like zettlr would offer, but it be easy to write a python script to do that, and to add a a line to my crontab file to update things every so often.
The good thing about my setup is that the markdown format is not tied to any particular application. That's important, if you want your database of notes to last for a long time.
by fluder on 7/3/20, 2:07 PM
by fastball on 7/3/20, 2:57 PM
The major differentiator is that content is based around notecards rather than documents/files, and there are multiple ways to structure these cards.
The most powerful way to organize things is with multi-parent nesting, where you put cards inside of other cards, and each card can have any number of parents. You can share these cards with others, and they can add their own parents to it that don't interfere with yours, allowing you to have shared cards that exist within entirely different hierarchies that are unique to each individual user.
That's a feature that I think is unique in the space, but we also have the links/backlinks and tags that you will see elsewhere (though tagging is similarly powerful in that shared cards can have tags that are public vs tags that are private to the user).
You can check it out here:
by kirubakaran on 7/3/20, 3:48 PM
by garfieldnate on 7/4/20, 8:49 AM
by sitkack on 7/4/20, 5:04 AM
I found notes on the iphone to be excellent, but the content appears to be locked up inside of apple's swamp. The pdf exports were horrid.
by slezyr on 7/3/20, 2:12 PM
by dsissitka on 7/3/20, 2:17 PM
https://www.zettlr.com/post/zettlr-170-released
Mirror here:
by threatofrain on 7/3/20, 5:35 PM
Still waiting for something to best VSC. What do people working with a combination of code and Latex use?
by _cowb on 7/3/20, 1:52 PM
by 627467 on 7/3/20, 10:41 PM
Additionally I started taking notes on Left https://100r.co/site/left.html
by bb88 on 7/3/20, 6:33 PM
When I solve a problem I want to have an open source format and viewer(s) for whatever problem domain it's in. So for things like software, that's easy, it's just text. For things like electrical schematics and physics calculations, it's not so easy.
So then I go down the path of how do I get X to show Y? Like how do I get github to show me a gerber plot from kicad? That's what's really keeping me from using tools like this, native format viewers for the tools we're using.
by stakkur on 7/3/20, 4:50 PM
1. A folder of markdown and org files
2. Emacs, gEdit
3. A notebook
I get the urge to 'optimize' this sort of thing, but the results seem to be nothing more than visual presentation tweaks.
by odilontalk on 7/4/20, 3:17 AM
by fab1an on 7/4/20, 7:13 AM
I have seen a lot of buzz around Roam (which is interesting given how outright terrible the initial user experience and conversion funnel is - I did not have the patience and unsub'd immediately..)
I ended up buying https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ Super straightforward Zettelkasten system, and most importantly utilizing plain txt and not some weird proprietary format.
by steveklabnik on 7/3/20, 1:56 PM
by bubersson on 7/4/20, 6:39 PM
For now I ended up with Mark Text (https://marktext.app/), which is open source, cross platform, works nicely and the migration time was zero (folder with .md files ftw).
by crooked-v on 7/3/20, 8:01 PM
by jeffbee on 7/3/20, 5:39 PM
by ChuckMcM on 7/3/20, 8:06 PM
by greenie_beans on 7/3/20, 4:36 PM
by Pmop on 7/3/20, 2:26 PM
by konart on 7/3/20, 6:00 PM
by garfieldnate on 7/7/20, 4:58 PM
by beattheprose on 7/3/20, 4:11 PM
by diimdeep on 7/3/20, 3:33 PM
by divbzero on 7/3/20, 11:57 PM
[1]: https://typora.io/
by rohithkp on 7/3/20, 3:09 PM
by bassman9000 on 7/3/20, 3:55 PM
by mrwesleycrusher on 7/3/20, 4:38 PM
by polskibus on 7/3/20, 1:55 PM
by gorgoiler on 7/4/20, 12:09 AM
For me, that’s the key to discoverability and categorization.
by Keyframe on 7/3/20, 4:44 PM
by m-p-3 on 7/3/20, 6:04 PM
by _pmf_ on 7/3/20, 6:46 PM
by supersrdjan on 7/3/20, 7:26 PM
by jtth on 7/3/20, 7:58 PM
by smhmd on 7/3/20, 4:13 PM
by someusername99 on 7/11/20, 11:31 AM
― Frank Herbert, Dune
by thomasfl on 7/3/20, 10:14 PM
by lastgeniusua on 7/3/20, 2:08 PM
by captainredbeard on 7/3/20, 3:15 PM
by gdevenyi on 7/4/20, 12:39 AM
by app4soft on 7/3/20, 9:02 PM
Uh, I would prefer VNote editor + Viki instead.