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Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

zettlr.com

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

#81
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing this ecosystem is missing is a measure of how effective people are after switching from one tool or another. E.g. our company implemented the use of Zettelkasten in a randomized trial and engineering efficiency improved by x% in the experimental group compared with y% in the control group. It seems like much of the ecosystem is like some areas of the Linux ecosystem, where the goal is more to focus on getti…

How do you quantify “efficiency“?

However you like. Presumably people invest in these tools for some reason.

Maybe "developer ergonomics survey results" is one definition of the goal is just for people to feel more in command of their area of work.

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

#82

I can't believe nobody bothered to link TiddlyWiki [1] here... Especially since this crowd here should be able to run it directly from npm, which makes it much easier (conceptually, for me) than "a self-modifying html file". :P 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 b…

I spent about an hour trying to set up a TiddlyWiki for a Zettelkasten, but couldn't get it working. I was overwhelmed by the number of editors available. I now use Zettlr.

Is there a tutorial you used to help your set up?

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that the area of knowledge management is very interesting and worthy of discussion. When it comes to tooling though, I've tried out a couple and I don't find anything superior to a folder full of markdown files + your favorite text editor (I use VSCode, but I don't think that's especially important). Systems like Zettelkasten are interesting to read about, but again, everyone's brain is different and for m…

One thing this ecosystem is missing is a measure of how effective people are after switching from one tool or another. E.g. our company implemented the use of Zettelkasten in a randomized trial and engineering efficiency improved by x% in the experimental group compared with y% in the control group. It seems like much of the ecosystem is like some areas of the Linux ecosystem, where the goal is more to focus on getti…

Re: research on engineering efficiency, there needs to be a baseline to compare with, and a way to make the studies reproducible.

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

#84
post #50

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.

They've changed their licensing since it was first announced on HN. They're still pretty murky. For instance, the personal license excludes certain types of work (but the phrasing is unclear); but the commercial license states it's only required for businesses of two or more people.

The personal license is no longer a subscription (if it was ever, I don't really remember), but the commercial license still is, even for non-Enterprise.

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

#85
I read some blog post within the past year are so, written by some young engineer for shopify or spotify. They detailed the way they built their zettelkasten. It was well-written and more detailed than most blog posts in that genre. I can’t find it on HN or Google. Anybody know what I’m talking about?

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

#86
I've been a heavy Standard Notes user for a couple years now, and the added function of Zettlr looks extremely appealing to me (images, linking, much nicer rendering, etc.). However, to really give this a test drive to see if it's a suitable replacement, I downloaded all my Standard Notes as plain text and tried importing them. This caused a ton of bugs/errors when trying to navigate and use the results. First, it complained about not being able to detect the file type -- again, these are all plain text that end in .txt... Second, it seems to have a ton of trouble with renaming folders: it works the first time, renames it on the filesystem, but then doesn't keep the change in the app? Then I try to reload and rename the folder back and now it throws null variable errors left and right? Then, I try to create sub-folders to start organizing the mess of notes I just imported and... big choke, can't create the folder, sometimes it gives an error and other times it just does nothing. The performance (speed opening tabs, scrolling notes) seems to degrade quite a bit with the number of notes I have.

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.

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

#88

Shameless plug: I've been building a similar tool for the past couple years, although it is not FOSS :( 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 ca…

I love the metaphor of a massively hyperlinked card. It reminds me a little of https://mochi.cards , which I've enjoyed spending time with. But these things can only ever remain idle curiosities to me when they're closed source. We're talking about a knowledge graph that only really flexes itself with years of dedicated entry, roaming and combing through its interlinks for that electric flash of idea-sex. Why should…

Absolutely – it's definitely a tough balance to find. At some point in the future we'd like to have Supernotes be a federated solution with self-hosting available, but that goal is quite a bit out, if it can happen at all.

In the meantime, we already have the ability to export all your cards as markdown, and are currently trying to find ways to export your actual data graph in a format that could possibly be used elsewhere. Obviously the hard part with this is that, as I mentioned, our structuring options are somewhat unique, so there isn't really a way to export it in a way that could be readily consumed by other tools.

For the last point, this would be solved by federation / self-hosting. But again, in the meantime, we want to get closer to this goal by offering a lifetime subscription[1] (which is cheaper than Roam's offer which lasts 5 years).

[1] https://supernotes.app/pricing/

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

#89
post #38

Two words, Org mode: https://orgmode.org/ 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.

Switched to emacs(spacemacs) from vim last year, because I wanted to know what the craze with org-mode is all about. Am using mu4e, elfeed, rcirc, magit, org-mode and started using org-roam this week. I still suck at elisp, but emacs with org-mode really is a blast. I love my agenda: whenever I get confused what I was about to do, it is only some keystrokes away. I feel insanely organized while forgetting everything…

Did you find mu4e difficult to set up? That's something I started investigating lately but the things I've seen all feel somewhat more involved than anything else I've done with emacs.

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

#90
post #38

Two words, Org mode: https://orgmode.org/ 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.

Switched to emacs(spacemacs) from vim last year, because I wanted to know what the craze with org-mode is all about. Am using mu4e, elfeed, rcirc, magit, org-mode and started using org-roam this week. I still suck at elisp, but emacs with org-mode really is a blast. I love my agenda: whenever I get confused what I was about to do, it is only some keystrokes away. I feel insanely organized while forgetting everything…

Wait until you start doing email ... oh wait, mu4e ... never mind.

Wait until you start reading news ... oh wait, elfeed ... never mind.

Well, you get the point ;-)

Just don't install a kernel - emacs already comes with an OS :P

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