Forum Posts Feed
A significant development with Craft
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Simon
Jun 2, 2021 at 07:21 PM
Why Craft and not Obsidian or Roam? Would be interested to know.
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
Craft has now incorporated a Calendar view which makes it easy to create
>daily notes. This is an excellent addition. I don’t know if this has
>been implemented in the web version yet, but I doubt it. Once the web
>version catches up to the Mac version, Craft could be a real solution
>for note-taking for me.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jun 2, 2021 at 09:51 PM
I am a fan of both Obsidian and Roam, but I don’t like writing in either app a whole lot. Craft feels more like a genuine word processor with note-linking skills. But I have not yet really committed to Craft. I like it and hope it evolves enough to lure me over completely. We’ll see.
Simon wrote:
Why Craft and not Obsidian or Roam? Would be interested to know.
>
>Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Craft has now incorporated a Calendar view which makes it easy to create
>>daily notes. This is an excellent addition. I don’t know if this has
>>been implemented in the web version yet, but I doubt it. Once the web
>>version catches up to the Mac version, Craft could be a real solution
>>for note-taking for me.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 3, 2021 at 08:29 AM
Heh, I confess I’ve just been playing with the Calendar feature, which is very well conceived. Especially impressive is the ability to create an instant “meeting notes” subdocument from the event details in one’s Calendars. For example, I have a Microsoft Teams videoconference set up for Tuesday – I simply clicked on it in Craft’s calendar view, and it offered to generate a new “Meeting Note” for me; the resulting note is created as a subdocument within the Daily Note, and contains an elegantly folded outline with the following top levels:
> Notes from Calendar
> Attendees
> Location
and finally a link preceded by “Join Call:”, after which there’s a divider and you can type your notes, agenda or whatever else directly into the page.
That is sensationally convenient.
On the downside, there’s currently no obvious way of linking notes elsewhere (or indeed tasks in notes) to the Calendar view (à la NotePlan), other than copying and pasting them into the Daily Note for a given day.
You can, of course, copy and paste entire documents as subdocuments in a given Daily Note, but this is a strong argument for something I’ve been urging for a while, namely transclusion – Craft is such an obvious candidate for it!
But a very impressive step forward for an already impressive tool. Especially since, unlike Agenda, Craft allows you to open documents/subdocuments/notes etc. in separate windows.
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 3, 2021 at 08:42 AM
Having said all that about transclusion, I’ve also been experimenting with Craft’s internal links. And they are also very impressive.
Craft recently made it very easy to link directly to specific “blocks” (= paragraphs) in different documents simply by selecting a word and then choosing the “markdown link” option from the pop-up menu – this will produce an instant search box with the relevant word highlighted in (a) this document, (b) other pages and (c) blocks. Or you can spontaneously create a new document from the link. The mini-preview that appears as you hover over each link makes it immensely easy to decide exactly what to link.
This offers a very easy way to link a Daily Note to any other note in your repository. I’ve not seen such an efficient mechanism in any other notetaking app (although Roam and Obsidian have similar concepts, the Craft execution is just mind-bogglingly elegant and clear – in fact, “elegant and clear” pretty much defines their philosophy).
Again, profoundly impressive…
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 3, 2021 at 09:10 AM
The only downside to the backlinks feature is that it treats each “block” as a page, so you only see backlinks to a block (paragraph) if you “go inside” the block (as Craft users will know, any block can be treated as a sub-page/subdocument, i.e. you can “enter” the block and create extensive content within it – if you do, the top-level block will be treated as the page title for additional content).
So you only see backlinks at the top level (i.e. in the master document itself) if they link to the master document; if they link to blocks or subdocuments within the master document, they will only show up in those blocks or subdocuments, and not at top level.
There are, of course, pros and cons to this approach!