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Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

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

#101

Post by vvillena »

esperent wrote: post #34
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 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…

A Zettelkasten-style system is just a bunch of files in a single folder, with lots of links between them.

What makes these kinds of notes work is the purpose they are written for, and the links. Two people can have the exact same notes, but link and tag them completely differently, because each of them will have different goals and purposes.

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

#102

Post by I_am_tiberius »

electricEmu wrote: post #73
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #56

Joplin and Standard notes are great as well. I lost one week of data due to some synchronization issue with Joplin though - but the markdown editor is great (they even have a new WYSIWYG editor). Standard notes is good but it's missing good file/image support which is really annoying.

What happened with your Joplin sync issue? I am interested in using Joplin exclusively and use both apps currently. The Standard Notes development team is nice but refactors happen too frequently and estimates are rarely (never) produced, even though the product is paid Open Source.

It's a pity because Joplin has pretty much the perfect feature set for me. I can't tell you much about the sync issue I had as I didn't find a solution (I also didn't spend too much time on it). Btw. I initially migrated from zim and the migration was super easy!!! What I can tell you is that Joplin suddenly didn't show any notes anymore because of a sync issue. In the source folder I saw some files still there but the notes of the previous week were all gone. I would have appreciated to have the option to tell Joplin that I don't care about sync and want my local Joplin files to be the primary ones - or something like that.

I then bought a 5 year plan of Standard notes which is not as user friendly as Joplin (in my opinion) but has some cool features (like the spreadsheet extension which is awesome). However, as mentioned, without being able to just paste images it's more or less useless for preparing blog posts or something like that. You need to use "fileSafe" I guess but for this you need Dropbox etc.. Other features missing in Standard Notes are simple drag & drop of folders and context menu...

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

#103

Post by fluffything »

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…

I use typora to write markdown on macos and am very happy.

To sync, I use a git repository (you can set a watchpoint on macos and linux to any directory to invoke a command on changes, so I just invoke git and commit).

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

#104

Post by input_sh »

stevesimmons wrote: post #64
douglaswlance wrote: post #19

There is nothing that compares to using your preferred text editor to write personal knowledge documents like this. I swapped over to [Foam]( https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ ) in VSCode recently when it was released, and it's like a breath of fresh air. I can use my keyboard shortcuts, extensions, and snippets. Nothing else can compare.

In the last week, I've started using Foam too. It hits the sweet spot for me: - Plain Markdown files stored in git; exactly what I am used to for code. - Editor is VisualStudioCode, which I always have open, and can configure however I like. - No vendor lock-in.

You have to do the sync via GitHub, which is in and of itself a vendor lock-in in my opinion.

I really don't get why I can't just point to any Git repo for syncing purposes.

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

#105

Post by techntoke »

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…

If we write it down on a piece of paper and there is a fire or natural disaster it easily lost or destroyed. If you factor in writing it down on a piece of paper, scanning and making it searchable then it is easier just to input it on an electronic device.

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

#106

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

Kinrany wrote: post #83
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #51

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…

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

Yes, I agree. That's why my example was a randomized trial. But you could also compare with a baseline from results in the previous year or whatever.

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

#107

Post by smilekzs »

darkstarsys wrote: post #97

Not a popular opinion I'm sure, but I'm all-in on OneNote. Works everywhere (at least basically) and it is just so rich. Full pen support for drawing (vital for me), tables, equations (sort of), multiple text blocks on a page (also key!), internal & external links, fast search (as of last year). Search is good enough that I rarely use tags anymore. Yes, it's totally vendor locked in and I do hate that. And no syntax…

Long-time OneNote user chiming in. I've briefly switched to Evernote but due to their frequent screw-ups I switched back to OneNote. Stylus input is a big part for my dev logs, and one good thing about OneNote is that it accepts both handwriting and text without prejudice.

Also, pages in OneNote are allowed to have 2 levels of indent. More than that you can organize with traditional folder structures. The difference is that a less indented "parent" page can still have content; a folder does not contain content on its own.

I would strongly recommend OneTastic as it adds quite a few missing features from stock OneNote (crop image, calendar view, etc.)

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

#108

Post by threatofrain »

I like the general look and feel but it still feels clunky to switch between the markdown and presentation view, copy-pasting markdown (tables, etc) doesn't work right, and more importantly, Latex is clunky.

Still waiting for something to best VSC. What do people working with a combination of code and Latex use?

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

#109

Post by space_ghost »

prima-facie wrote: post #69

I can recommend Zim wiki which is a GTK+ desktop app that works as a personal wiki / notebook. Has a WYSIWYG editor and can export to different formats, it can even render the wiki as html and serve it. Also supports plugins for extra things like tables and charts if you wish. You can have separate notebooks for each project like home/work/etc. You can commit to git from the UI, have git hooks set to automatically pu…

I've been using Zim for daily notes stashed to a Dropbox folder for many years.

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

#110

Post by bbx »

One feature I have yet to find in any Markdown editor is a simple "block" mover, which I describe here: https://twitter.com/jgthms/status/1225513837379641350

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".

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