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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

#161

Post by bliff »

cborenstein wrote: post #149
bliff wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My system lately has been to write every note as a raw text file that I save to a git repository on the fly. Later I process these notes and give them Zettlekasten style IDs. This step forces me to organize the knowledge: either everything gets a fresh ID (e.g. "25"), or it gets a derived ID that relates it to whatever subject or task it's related to (e.g. "44a3b9"). But it also means I can stream thoughts into a lig…

Awesome. Glad to see that separating the "getting stuff down" from organizing has worked for you too. Do you create a new raw text file for each note? How long does it typically take you to do the organizing process? > trying to establish your system upfront is a mistake. Things inevitably leak through your categories and then you lose faith in your system. I don't know if it's a mistake. I think you need to embrace…

I do create a new text file each time, although it's sort of arbitrary what I group. Sometimes I will put my entire day's notes for a given book in one file. Other times I'll have atomic notes for each thought.

The organization process is wholly dependent on how much I come up with in a day/week. I mostly read for fun now, so I don't have to rigorously organize lecture notes or anything like that for later use. On the other hand I'm pretty rigorous with how I process tasks. As a ballpark figure I'd say 30-60 minutes per week, or 5-10 minutes per night.

To your latter point, I think that's fair. The main idea is to be flexible and recognize when you need new categories or whatever (and when you can dump unhelpful ones).

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

#164

Post by cborenstein »

bliff wrote: post #161
cborenstein wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome. Glad to see that separating the "getting stuff down" from organizing has worked for you too. Do you create a new raw text file for each note? How long does it typically take you to do the organizing process? > trying to establish your system upfront is a mistake. Things inevitably leak through your categories and then you lose faith in your system. I don't know if it's a mistake. I think you need to embrace…

I do create a new text file each time, although it's sort of arbitrary what I group. Sometimes I will put my entire day's notes for a given book in one file. Other times I'll have atomic notes for each thought. The organization process is wholly dependent on how much I come up with in a day/week. I mostly read for fun now, so I don't have to rigorously organize lecture notes or anything like that for later use. On th…

Thanks for explaining! It sounds like you have a strong process going.

> I do create a new text file each time, although it's sort of arbitrary what I group. It's great that you do what works for you without obsessing. Too often people chase after a rigid/"perfect" system and that's just not realistic.

In my experience, the more modular you can go (without it stopping your flow), the better. Because it'll be easier in that organize step.

I've found that by thinking about my raw notes as a chat with myself, I'm able to increase the modularity without hurting my flow.

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

#165

Post by crooked-v »

I really wish these knowledge base-type apps that have been popping up, like this and Obsidians would use preexisting Markdown and Multimarkdown syntax for links and link references rather than inventing and leaning on their own bits of syntax that aren't usable with other tooling. The whole [[double bracket link]] thing in particular is a pain when none of the cross-referencing supports standard Markdown links between files.

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

#166

Post by emj »

endymi0n wrote: post #96
esperent wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The schemas are not that important though, I just use search 90% of the time anyway.

Since realizing this about 5 years ago, I‘ve actually started optimizing for it. Whenever I hit cmd+s, I make sure to enter a search mindset and make the file name as keyword heavy and stemming friendly as possible. For smaller notes, I just have Sublime Text open with iCloud sync and operate freely with hundreds of tabs. Since then, any thought has never been more than a Spotlight search or a „find in files“ away.

Stemming and keyword enrichment is something I've never seen done really good so I'm not sure you can build a tool that is good for it.

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

#167

Post by ChuckMcM »

Okay, I learned a new thing, the Zettelkasten. I've done half of this in my notebooks for a long time (where each page or set of pages that are about a particular topic are linked to the other pages in the notebook also on that topic with a doubly linked list) but the simplicity here is pretty cool.

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

#168

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

Sounds like this system would work really well for you. All it adds to "a folder full of markdown files + text editor" are a way of putting identifiers into those notes that lets you link them.

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

#169

Post by m-p-3 »

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…

I do think that Markdown hits the sweet spot between complexity and ease of use for quickly writing notes.

I do use an app called Joplin[1] because it can sync to some cloud services with End-to-End Encryption directly within the app, has a mobile app available for Android and iOS and because it includes some other features I find useful when I want to polish my notes and include some diagrams using MermaidJS[2].

[1]: https://joplinapp.org/

[2]: https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/examples

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

#170

Post by crooked-v »

fastball wrote: post #35

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…

A couple of quick bits of feedback, from trying it out for the first time:

- The app locks itself to the browser's light/dark mode setting, with no way to change it. This is a huge pain for people like me who prefer a dark UI but light page content.

- "where you put cards inside of other cards" - how to do this was totally unintuitive until random clicking around revealed that the edit button turned into a plus button, and under that was "add parent" (but not "add child"). The total lack of drag-and-drop functionality with the card focus seems really weird.

- The site advertises the ability to share cards, but the UI gives me zero idea how to do that, and the site seems to imply I can only share with logged-in users, which eliminates most of the reason I'd want to be easily share things in the first place.

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