See here:

https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125

This is a really great article. Thanks for posting it

Zettelkasten is a neat concept. One drawback in my newest fascination, Curio, is that it doesn't support hierarchical tags.

If you can impose a hierarchy on tags, they become an alternate organization for notes, not just a way to clump things together.

The world is a curious place, though. How can it possibly be that if I Google "law enforcement zettlekasten" I come up dry? You would think that would be a field that would drive all kinds of relational note-taking products.

Instead, I find articles like this one, https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-lotus-notes-20180808-story.html about Baltimore trying to graduate from Lotus Notes.

Interesting to speculate, that ragtag nerdy rebels could muster more advanced tools for fighting a war of information than the police.

Excellent article indeed.

Coincidentally (or not), Paul J. Miller just wrote a post on the IQ forum, linking to the same article.

In particular, he explains how the new Related Items links, available in InfoQube v114, enables the Zettelkasten method to be implemented:

https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=node/4838

Thanks Paul !

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer

I thought this was an interesting article about creating a Zettelkasten in Typora (cross-platform, in free beta for Mac for years):

https://medium.com/@stoweboyd/building-a-zettelkasten-in-typora-f22857c98301

Thanks.

Apart from the Typora advice -- useful -- the thing I noticed is the quoted 11 "principles" for note-taking promulgated by "David Clear" (whatever his bona fides are). The joy of note taking is that it is so free-form and open to invention. I suspect Niklas Luhmann enjoyed his note taking deeply. Wrapping that in a bunch of stifling rules is so-2020s.

satis wrote:

I thought this was an interesting article about creating a Zettelkasten
in Typora (cross-platform, in free beta for Mac for years):

https://medium.com/@stoweboyd/building-a-zettelkasten-in-typora-f22857c98301

Heh, I was quite inspired by the Typora article - enough to unearth Typora from my list of apps and reinstall it.

It’s a great app. The search engine is fantastic - blasts through multiple files in multiple folders at very high speed, highlighting hits like a pro.

And I’ve discovered themes - notably a theme that turns Typora into a Bear (Writer) clone. Because you can tweak the CSS, you can turn it into even more of a Bear clone! Although I love Bear, it’s being officially retired for the time being (until Typora finally sorts out a pricing plan of some kind, at which point Bear may be reinstated!).

What we need now is Typora for iOS/iPadOS. On the other hand, you can easily share files between Typora on macOS and e.g. iaWriter or 1Writer on iPadOS.

The tip about using a plus sign (+) for tags is a good one; Typora does have the rather irritating habit of interpreting hashtags as headings, even when there isn’t a space immediately after the hashtag. Typora also handles images quite well, unlike many other markdown apps.

Sorry, I meant to mention the name of the theme that turns Typora into Bear: Ursine (Polar or Umbra). I thoroughly recommend it - it even plays humorously on Bear’s background graphic when no note is loaded, showing a bear cub flying a balloon…

I’m currently using 1Writer as the Typora equivalent on iPad - I’m delighted the developer is still updating this august but excellent app, and only wish he’d go ahead and produce his own macOS version. But hey, Typora makes an excellent companion (although Typora supports tables of contents, whereas 1Writer doesn’t).

The other very powerful macOS/iOS app it’s worth mentioning here is MWeb, which is also perfectly capable of generating good-quality static websites. It’s been around for a while and continues to improve steadily. MWeb also supports nested folders and tagging, which makes it a great deal more powerful than many other markdown editors (apart from the wonderful TextNut, which appears to have died a death, alas). It doesn’t have nested tagging, alas, but nested folders goes a long way to alleviating that.

Cheers,
Bill

The main issue with Typora is that it doesn’t distinguish between the markdown hashtag used for headings, and hashtags used for tagging purposes. As far as Typora is concerned, all hashtags = headings!

Unfortunately, this is a bit of a problem, especially if you’re using Typora to reference multiple libraries of markdown notes, many of which include extensive tags.

So I’ve been having a bit of a play with my various markdown editors, and having briefly but thoroughly experimented with MWeb (which is remarkably powerful, and I can thoroughly recommend), I’ve finally found an interesting combination in the form of iA Writer and The Archive.

The Archive, as has been mentioned elsewhere, is Christian Tietze’s app for managing a Zettelkasten system. Its advantages are: speed, quick note-taking, automatic note naming, no need to save, an elegant “smart search” function, a very fast general search function. But it has multiple disadvantages, too (I hasten to add: in its current configuration. The roadmap details some splendid and ambitious goals for the project!)

So I’ve started to work with a mixture of The Archive and iA Writer. I hadn’t realised just how cleverly iA Writer handles tags. As you add folders to iA Writer’s “library” (I put it in quotes because unlike e.g. Ulysses, Bear, etc., it’s not a proprietary, databased library, it’s simply a list of all the folders you like to access when you open iA Writer), it automatically produces a list of all the tags found in files in each of the folders as you add them. It appears to be a comprehensive list of tags, too – whatever extraction engine they’re using works very well.

Unlike Typora’s, however, the search function is a bit more hit and miss. It does find search terms, but also finds “false positives”, sometimes for mystic reasons that appear to have no bearing on the search term whatsoever.

However, it’s a great method for managing lots of markdown notes in lots of disparate folders, because you can add all of those folders into the “library” (folder list). When paired with The Archive (yes, of course I’ve added The Archive’s single folder to the “library”), it makes for a neat combination, not least because iA Writer does things The Archive doesn’t, like show a two-line preview of each file (something I hope The Archive will be doing soon).

Meanwhile, last week I was lucky enough to be offered a preview of the next version of NotePlan. And wow, I can tell you that once it’s been finalised, you won’t need any other markdown editor, or any other Zettelkasten option (unless you’re running on Windows/Linux, unfortunately). There’s still a way to go, but I’m already a convert!

Cheers!
Bill

Bill,

Have you tried Roam Research? I was just talking with people on the Roam Research forums about how great it would be to have something that combined the slick user interface of Note Plan or Agenda with the features of Roam... Curious if the new version of Note Plan looks anything like this?

I have two blocks against doing anything substantial with Roam. First, the site seems flakey. Yesterday I waited 10+ minutes, twice during the day, while the site spun that compass-thingy before loading my documents. The second is the wild pricing that has been bandied about -- I do not want to dedicate time building up a dataset and then have expensive handcuffs thrown on it out of the blue. I wish the owner would get on with making the pricing final.

Luhmann wrote:

Bill,

Have you tried Roam Research? I was just talking with people on the Roam
Research forums about how great it would be to have something that
combined the slick user interface of Note Plan or Agenda with the
features of Roam... Curious if the new version of Note Plan looks
anything like this?

The site had some issues yesterday, but my understanding (from Slack) is that this is the first time anything like that happened since they went public. Also, they had recently implemented new sync measures to ensure that data didn't get lost.

No idea about pricing, but seems difficult to say at this point.

But, regardless of what the product looks like in the end, it is a very interesting approach to managing data and I think anyone who cares deeply about these issues and spends time on these forums would probably enjoy playing with it a bit and learning how it works. It will make you see other knowledge management apps quite differently!

I am watching Roam quite closely now and playing with it a little bit. But am hoping that their differentiating feature of bidirectional linking is adopted by Devonthink, Bear, etc. Not being a programmer, I wonder how difficult it would be to graft onto existing code bases.

Paul Korm wrote:

I have two blocks against doing anything substantial with Roam. First,
the site seems flakey. Yesterday I waited 10+ minutes, twice during
the day, while the site spun that compass-thingy before loading my
documents. The second is the wild pricing

I have the same concerns. Having a daily automatic plain text online backup to Dropbox/Google Drive that WorkFlowy and Dynalist can do would be essential before I would put any serious data into Roam.

And the pricing (even at the lower end that was suggested, $15/mo.) is wildly over the top compared to the likes of WorkFlowy and Dynalist, given what it offers. If Roam insists on those prices, there would soon be a competitor that could offer the same thing at half that price.

Luhmann wrote:

it is a very
interesting approach to managing data and I think anyone who cares
deeply about these issues and spends time on these forums would probably
enjoy playing with it a bit and learning how it works. It will make you
see other knowledge management apps quite differently!

It is the closest an online service has come to ConnectedText so far. There are many parallels. I wish CT had progressed in that direction, but sadly it hasn't happened.

Thanks, @Luhmann, for bringing Roam into this - yes, it’s an amazing app, I’d love to use it, but now have a firm policy in place that I won’t confide any data to an app that only exists online, no matter how good the export options are. I want my data in MY file system (even if I’ve chosen to use a Cloud-based file system!), not in somebody else’s.

We’ve made that a policy on the business level as well. Synchronisation has taken over from file serving as a valuable option for ensuring that files stay on your own machine(s). In the office, for example, we use Datto Workplace (a kind of Dropbox for business, but better than Dropbox, in my view) to synchronise files between virtual workers and our office-based LAN server. Yes, we use file serving internally (from the LAN server, because then we only have to sync a single computer in the office, rather than syncing multiple computers in the same location - a huge waste of bandwidth), but otherwise, data is synchronised everywhere.

This means we can back up these synchronised files in multiple places, too, so even if the Cloud service fails (Datto was formerly Autotask which was formerly Soonr…), we still have all our files, dating back many, many years.

That’s why I don’t use Roam, or Gingko, or any other pure online service. Control/security/reliability!

But if Roam ever produce a desktop/mobile app, I’ll be at the head of the queue…

Cheers!
Bill

MadaboutDana wrote:

That’s why I don’t use Roam, or Gingko, or any other pure
online service.

Just to point out that Gingko bifurcated itself into a service, separate from a desktop app at https://gingko.io/

Not necessarily recommending either at this time however, as development on both are tortoise-slow and the developer hasn't surfaced with announcements this year, I think. (Although the Mac app was given at least one small update this year.)

Bill,

I totally respect your choices about what kind of file system you want to have. I do want to reiterate however that there are good reasons to play with Roam and learn what it can do *even if you never intend to use it as part of your workflow*. A good comparison is Workflowy, which transformed the landscape for outliner apps. I tried Workflowy, Dynalist, Outlinely, Mubu, and Transno... In the same way, I think Roam will be inspiring a whole new class of apps. Already one of the Dynalist developers is working on a similar app (her's will meet your demands since it is just a folder of markdown files). The thing is, I think Roam works well because it combines a number of features that no other apps have combined: granularity, backtracks, filters, editable pages for each tag, query syntax, embedding, the sidebar, etc. The more I use it the more revolutionary I think it is. At the same time, it is still in beta and I would not recommend anyone make it an essential part of their workflow. The main reason to use it is to see what it is capable of and to understand the future of knowledge management apps / CRIMPing.

Is there something more you can say about this other than a hint? Who? Where? URL?

Luhmann wrote:

Already one of the Dynalist
developers is working on a similar app (her's will meet your demands
since it is just a folder of markdown files).

It isn't an open beta yet, so I would feel bad about sharing the info here, but I found out about it myself on the Roam Slack channel. You can look there. It is very early beta so far, so not much to see...

OK, so to cut through the mystery, this appears to be what the Roam Slackers are chatting about:

https://obsidian.md/index.html

Not much yet, as noted, but applications are being taken there.

Luhmann wrote:

It isn't an open beta yet, so I would feel bad about sharing the info
here, but I found out about it myself on the Roam Slack channel. You can
look there. It is very early beta so far, so not much to see...

Luhmann wrote:

It isn't an open beta yet, so I would feel bad about sharing the info
here, but I found out about it myself on the Roam Slack channel. You can
look there. It is very early beta so far, so not much to see...

I suspect it might be this one:

https://obsidian.md/

https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/fzi1bi/markdown_editor_with_back_links_and_local_storage/

Luhmann wrote:

will be inspiring a whole new class of apps. Already one of the Dynalist
developers is working on a similar app (her's will meet your demands
since it is just a folder of markdown files).

It's great to learn that Dynalist developers are behind this effort. Dynalist is a fabulous piece of software already, so I have high hopes for this.

Got the invite and the app. Very Erica. Simple and interesting design -- no doubt will evolve steadily. Not much point in thinking about using Roam now.

I was reluctant to post the link, but still glad that we can now talk about Obsidian as well as Roam here. I just posted a suggestion on the Obsidian forums (they use discordapp) for outliner features: folding and zooming. If you are using the beta and would like to see those (as I imagine most people here would), please go and up-vote those features in the forum!