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Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing

zettlr.com

131–140 of 265 posts

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

#131

Is it the generally-accepted practice to run an app like this in a network namespace or sandbox? How do I know it's not pilfering my research? I'd like to use a system like this for my work but I don't see how it can be trusted. I don't have the time to read the source. To be honest, I prefer a hosted solution because then I get a written contract about the privacy of my data.

Not getting your data stolen vs. being able to sue after the fact are two different concerns which are somewhat in conflict. If you want to be able to sue, then yes go with a hosted solution with a written contract. But if the priority is to not have your data stolen, handing your data over to a third party is a non-starter.

I don't necessarily agree. I feel like hosted solutions may have better security than I personally have. Plus, companies like Roam are staking their entire business on honoring their agreements.

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

#132

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 ran a private system for a while that proxied all my browser traffic and indexed it into Lucene/Solr. This was cute at the time but with the rise of javascript apps it became increasingly useless. There wasn't anything worth indexing in the responses. These days something like Zotero Connector is probably what you want.

That’s a really cool approach though! Maybe an updated version would be to have a headless browser shadowing your browsing and indexing the rendered HTML - there would still be some gaps though.

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

#133

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…

Really love Zim wiki and have been using it for over a decade. Sadly, the move to py3 and gtk3 broke it for non-linux platforms. macOS how has a huge wealth of [reported] bugs that break common keyboard shortcuts at the OS level and introduced a lot of performance problems. This isn't the fault of Zim as these are all bugs from gtk3 where it seems like the priority for non-linux bugs is 0. Meanwhile, Windows no longer has a prepackaged installer as the maintainer stopped doing that post transition.

I've tried hacking my way around this but to no avail. It's gotten to the point that I've finally started seriously looking and testing alternatives. Nothing has come close to replicating the feature set and UI workflow.

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

#134
Ultimately as an engineer, what I want to capture are things like schematics, vector diagrams, equations and mechanical drawings of things I have found interesting over my career.

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.

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

#135

If anybody is sad about Zettlr not having the graph view of like the one in Obsidian or RoamResearch, please be patient. A PR is already open for it. -> https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/921 OpenSource powaaaaa! :)

Does anybody find that graph view (like in Obsidian) useful? I play around with it for a while, but I don't really find it useful for any particular thing. Also overtime that graph grows too big to be visually easy to see patterns etc.

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

#136
zettlr does not seem to be able to import markdown files, which is a problem for people like me who have lots of such files. Maybe there is a way around that, but I am not motivated to spend much time seeking it, since I find vimwiki to be sufficient for navigating through links in my files. (Also, vimwiki makes it easy to create links, with the strike of a key.)

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.

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

#137
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“?

Lines of code / time

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

#139
post #30

Could someone enlighten me what is the biggest advantage or this and similar tools over libreoffice writer? I've been using it extensively for years for technical documentation, have hundreds of bitrot-free documents, and am extensively using: * 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…

I wasn't aware you could create links from one libreoffice writer document to another?

I meant navigating quickly within headers of the same document. Certainly you can insert links to external documents, but it feels more useful theoretically than practically, as you'd seldom open a document looking for a specific thing, and decide to read the general supporting articles too.
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