Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

zettlr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 265 posts

Re: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

#41

Post by mikro2nd »

wenc wrote: post #13

Folks who are familiar with Zettelkasten: 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"?

So Zim-Wiki with the Backlinks plugin, then. Notes (wikipages) are stored as ordinary text files in a directory structure that is whatever hierarchy you've used in the notes. (I tend not to use hierarchy much for my every-day notes.)

Zim doesn't use Markdown as it's native or input syntax, but can copy text as md if you so wish.

Honestly one of the most underrated, understated tools I've ever come across, and one I would hate to have to live without.

Re: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

#42

Post by mikro2nd »

scribu wrote: post #20
wenc wrote: post #13

Folks who are familiar with Zettelkasten: 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"?

It's not that. Wikipedia, for example, has a separate "pages that link to this" view. What makes Roam Research different is "block addressing", i.e. you can get a reference to a single paragraph and use it in other docs (either referencing it or embedding it). (and of course a nice UX for editing)

A nice UX? Personally I've found Roam to be flaky as hell. (Perhaps it just doesn't like Firefox very much.)

Re: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

#44

Post by drcode »

mxuribe wrote: post #5
bloopernova wrote: post #2

I'm really happy that the "knowledge base management" type of tools are getting a lot more attention these days. In my opinion, the more brains that look at this area, the better the whole ecosystem will get. 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…

> I'm really happy that the "knowledge base management" type of tools are getting a lot more attention these days... I share this happiness...It often feels like so many people assume this is a solved sort of area; But i believe it is not.

I think the main unsolved problem is that we need our notes organized both based on subject matter, as well as based on importance, with a high level of granularity on both dimensions (i.e. sentence level granularity)

It's very hard to come up with a good, simple mechanism that lets you look at notes from both of those perspectives and to mix those two levels (i.e. "show me the high importance notes organized by subject")

One associated challenge is that we don't really have a good way of knowing importance of information ahead of time, so an additional problem is to come up with good heuristics for estimating importance based on other factors.

Re: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

#46

Post by tweetle_beetle »

dmytton wrote: post #29

Note-taking seems to be a hot topic lately. I used Apple Notes for a long time because it was very lightweight and minimalist, but recent releases of macOS have been very buggy, so I decided to review all the options. I wrote this up at https://davidmytton.blog/the-best-note-taking-apps-for-mac-m... which has become one of the most trafficked post on my blog in the last few months! The key for me is a) plain text fil…

Seeing as your list is pretty comprehensive, it might be worth having a look at Writemonkey. It's been in development since 2006 - so long before the markdown editor trend in recent years, and probably even pre-dating the distraction-free trend about a decade ago.

The most recent incarnation (v3) fits your two criteria well and its plugin system is very versatile. Sadly cross platform supports only came with version 3 and that means saying goodbye to the small Windows native downloads, but it's not an Electron monstrosity.

Just a long time fan and always feel a bit disappointed that it never comes up in these kind of discussions :)

http://www.writemonkey.com/wm3/

(And in a pinch, away from my own machine, StackEdit is great.)

Re: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

#47

Post by marvinblum »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #18

I think this trend of better knowledge tools is missing two very important pieces of human nature 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 t…

I find it hard to get people to write down anything. And if they do, they often times don't put enough effort into it, like writing down some bullet points without context or screenshots without adding text. This is a personal and cultural problem at companies and in teams. A lot of people don't know how to generate value from taking notes/documentation and aren't good writers in general. I'm still thinking about how you can teach people what's important when it comes to writing and when to take notes.

I couldn't agree more with your second point. Search is probably even more important than taking notes in the first place. I find myself searching through my notes multiple times a day, even if it's something you can find at Google at the same speed. But my notes are mine, meaning I know what I can't remember or in which form I need some piece of information. Sometimes, I write a long article about something and other times some bullet points are good enough. When I share my notes on a team/organization I try to make sure the context is clear. It's a bit like code: it's read by an order of magnitude more often than written/changed.

We built Emvi [1] to make note taking more collaborative and with focus on searchability and ease of use. I hope I can write more about this topic on our blog. In case you have ideas on how to solve these cultural problems, please let me know.

[1] https://emvi.com/

Re: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

#48

Post by marvinblum »

wenc wrote: post #13

Folks who are familiar with Zettelkasten: 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"?

Hm yes and no. They are quite similar, but I would say a Zettelkasten is focused on connections rather than the "articles" itself. Cards probably won't contain as much information as a fully fledged article. I wrote about it here: https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...

Re: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

#49

Post by maddyboo »

Neuron is a new Zettelkasten project that shows a lot of promise. The developer is very active and responsive. I like that it is an editor-independent cli tool, with plugins currently for Vim and Emacs.

https://neuron.zettel.page/

https://github.com/srid/neuron

Re: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

#50

Post by DerWOK »

sanchitnevgi wrote: post #12

I've been using Obsidian ( https://obsidian.md/ ) for the past few weeks and it has been really great.

Yes, I also looked into Obsidian. And I really liked it. But their license scheme would have forced me to buy a subscription to also use it in work environment.

So I switched to Zettlr and never looked back.

Would they have allowed the personal one-time bought license to use in professional working, I would have sticked.

Post reply on HN