Messages

26

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: February 03, 2022, 08:13 AM »

"Before the 2020s, a note was just a note. A note was something you took, used, and tossed.

Let's call this: "Churn and Burn".

But now, in the Age of the [[Linked]] Note things are different. Now notes can grow and evolve with other notes, to form
a living system of related thoughts that you can develop throughout your lifetime.

Let's call this: "Know and Grow".

THE ANSWER ISN'T MORE NOTES... IT'S BETTER NOTES."

https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/

I find that very interesting. Yeah, notetakers have taken a leap forward and we are only starting to understand how PKM works.
Funny that there are people selling products in the 1000s of $ to teach you how to organize your notes. Not endorsing the course, E haven't even finished reading the landing page

27

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: February 03, 2022, 07:15 AM »

In fact, zim has the least firepower (in devs) of all these 'new apps' that take notetaking to a next level.
Comparing it with roam, athens, or remnote is unfair as those apps have millions in the bank and hordes of developers. Not to mention an active community.

Zim is written mostly by one dev, Jaap, who is really amazing and dedicated, but has a fulltime job and does zim on his spare time! The tech stack (python instead of JS/electron) makes it very difficult to implement dynamic graphs. There are great libs for electron but none that I know of for python.

Jaap has a strong sense of design and simplicity. It has made zim a monumentally useful app. And it's still the fastest UX of all notetaking apps. His decision to stick to desktop and not doing electron crap IS the killer feature.

It's only when reaching 1000s of notes in zim that I'm starting to value more the advantages of a dynamic graph. I know people here moved to obsidian for the graph but ended up not using it very much. I was of the same opinion (graph is a gimmick) but now with many notes I would love to link them graphically.

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General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: February 03, 2022, 03:26 AM »

I have found one potential problem in zim. Graph view is a second class citizen. It's static (can't filter, search, group etc), it's slow to render (>10s for large graphs), and the lead dev doesn't have plans to make  it better.

Given the tremendous competitive pressure in this space, this could be enough for me to move to an alternative. After years of adding notes, thinking with the graph view starts gaining value.

Problem is most of the competitors are browser based/electron, and that means typing latency is very high. I find typing latency very important (measure it with typometer from Pavel Faltin). If you can convince yourself that it doesn't matter, then by all means you an use any browser-based tool for writing... I can't

29

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: February 02, 2022, 02:52 PM »

https://zenkit.com/en/hypernotes/

Is either one of those what you were referring to?

-wraith808 (January 28, 2022, 09:20 PM)

The second one

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General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: February 02, 2022, 04:45 AM »

Very uncomfortable with Obsidian's direction (I'll address that in another post).

Very curious, please link here.

Obsidian has better filtering for graph stuff.
I just use it to visualize things better than in zim, where graphs are static and cannot be filtered in any way.
Obsidian UX bugs me.

At that point you could just use a 'real' graph editor from graphviz format like https://github.com/ArsMasiuk/qvge.

Here's the author saying graph stuff is not in his priority list:
https://github.com/z...iki/discussions/1892

31

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: January 28, 2022, 02:50 PM »

Check hypernote if you want something zettel-like for the web and with collaboration built in

32

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: January 21, 2022, 01:54 PM »

Cryptpad is great, no idea it existed!
if it could import zim files and keep the links it'd be a wonderful way of requesting comments.

33

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: January 18, 2022, 10:00 AM »

How do you guys collaborate with others (if at all) when using plain text? Say real time (like gdocs; MDhack for example) or asynchronoulsly (github for example)?

34

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: January 18, 2022, 09:59 AM »

Zim can produce sites that are very similar to what emanote does (if I got it right). I'm seriously considering having a public facing website (and internal docs) in zim.

The one thing I don't think it solves well is collaboration/molecular permissions.

35

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: January 14, 2022, 04:45 PM »

I'm not saying that you should adopt asciidoc vs markdown, only that converting between any of these text formats is easy now with things like pandoc. This is why zimwiki's format is pretty solid as a choice. And the spec is clearer (worst case scenario that the tool goes away, I can still read it and render it easy.

Try it and you will see how much of a difference it makes on typing latency. It 'feels' different. You can measure with typometer (From Pavel Faltin).

36

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: January 03, 2022, 09:11 AM »

Well, I'd like to have a way to do hand-drawing in zim. But otherwise it's spot on for me.

37

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: January 03, 2022, 09:10 AM »

Non-markdown format is not a big issue for me as long as it's plain text. There's pandoc. I moved from .md to zimwiki with it, no problems.

Now that we are talking, I find markdown a poor choice; the spec is poor (one blog bost!), there are multiple implementations/flavors, and it doesn't have good solutions for tables, embedding video etc (other than reverting to html). It forces apps to run a browser (or worse, embed it) to render it too.

For a killer plaintext format, check asciidoc. That was my choice before I went back to zim.

Check the plugins for zim too.

Other than collaboration (zim is a single player game), I'm very satisfied. Never been this satisfied with a software choice before.

38

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

« on: January 01, 2022, 09:03 AM »

Came here after years of inactivity to say : zim https://zim-wiki.org/
It's everything I wanted from a notetaking tool. And it was great keyboard latency, being a native app and not a SASS or an electron app.

Probably the most useful piece of software I have right now.

39

General Software Discussion / Re: Modern forum software: Discourse

« on: June 28, 2017, 05:48 AM »

I thought there was not a single human in the universe that thought that the 'old guard forums' were better than Discourse. But @tuxman proved me wrong. Ok, no need to go any further on my side . I'll go back under my rock where I have been the last 5 years . I do think the content of DC is also somewhat 'stuck in time'. I think the time when finding cool desktop apps (on windows) was a thing. There were discounts, great reviews, interesting people thinking about usability... They are probably still here, but the paradigm is just not interesting to me at all. Not only because I'm on linux: web apps kinda made desktop apps redundant in all but a few use cases IMHO.

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General Software Discussion / Modern forum software: Discourse

« on: June 26, 2017, 04:34 AM »

Hi guys,

This is a 'back from the death' post after many years innactive. Looks like the internet has moved on and there's now far more modern forum software. I like Discourse, but there must be others... The thing is that this community feels like a 90's forum and this may be slowing its growth. I'm talking as a single person here, YMMV, but... DC lost me years ago, I wonder how much the software had anything to do with it.

41

Living Room / Re: Mechanical Keyboards

« on: July 02, 2016, 09:27 AM »

I have lots of mechanical keyboards. My favorite switch is now Matias alps, but it used to be cherry blacks.

42

General Software Discussion / Firemin: reduce FF memory usage

« on: June 27, 2016, 12:28 AM »

Hi guys,

https://rizonesoft.com/download/firemin/

Have a look at Firemin. It claims to reduce FF memory usage. From reading here, I know all these memory optimizers don't really work, but in this case it definitely stops a small machine I have from swapping to an HDD, so it definitely saves the bacon.

Thoughts?

43

General Software Discussion / Re: So, what pdf reader app is your fav?

« on: November 22, 2015, 12:54 PM »

Try okular. Comes with KDE for windows. It has two key features:

• It has an overview mode, where you can see 3 pages at once on a big monitor
• It removes the white borders around pages.

Anyone has a reader than can provide this?

44

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox: I got stuck on 'search as you type'. Any way to get back?

« on: August 05, 2015, 10:07 AM »

Still no idea about what could be wrong

45

General Software Discussion / Firefox: I got stuck on 'search as you type'. Any way to get back?

« on: August 05, 2015, 05:27 AM »

Silly question.
In Firefox, I got stuck on 'search as you type'.
I don't want this behavior. I have one-key shortcuts that I want to recover.
The obvious solutions don't work: (http://stackoverflow...ping-on-pages-with-k)

If I go to  Tools->Options->Advanced->General Tab and the checkbox for "Search for text when I start typing" is not on. but if I press a key, it shows the tiny overlay and higlights the searches.

Any idea what could be wrong? Any workaround? Maybe this is an addon taking over?

Btw: cyberfox with the same tabs uses less CPU, but more memory So I may move there permanently.

46

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« on: May 24, 2015, 05:50 AM »

It's not the fonts themselves but the font smoothing technology.
They are phasing out cleartype, which is the one mactype fixes.
The new technology is better for fast zooming (common in tablets) but horrible overall for readability on large desktop monitors.

I have no high hopes.

47

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« on: May 23, 2015, 05:16 PM »

The key question here is: are the horrible fonts introduced in office 2013 (not cleartype, but whatever new B/W tech they are using now) the default for more apps in the OS? If so, I'm out. I'm only tolerating windows thanks to mactype, an ancient, unsuported app that fixes fonts for good.

48

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: WizNote (a PIM from China) - Mini-Review + Provisional User Forum

« on: April 11, 2015, 02:35 PM »

I'm going to stay with wiznote with encrypted notes. Pity because I use a wacom tablet instead of a mouse, and onenote is very good at this kind of pen notes. But everything else is weaker in onenote.

49

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: WizNote (a PIM from China) - Mini-Review + Provisional User Forum

« on: April 11, 2015, 01:00 AM »

@motion12, looks like one can install the remote part on own server now. Pretty big deal if you ask me.
I haven't done it. Looks enterprisey.

@Ian, which is your primary notetakes now, onenote or wiznote? You have been a vocal advocate of both for a while

Trying to make this decision myself. I don't want to have my data on a MS server, but wiznote has no info on privacy whatsoever. Lesser of two evils? One can encrypt all notes in wiznote though. But the certificate comes from their server, so they must be able to decrypt my notes. I've been getting chinese spam lately, which can only come from a wiznote leak because it's the only chinesse product I use

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: WizNote (a PIM from China) - Mini-Review + Provisional User Forum

« on: April 11, 2015, 12:56 AM »

Has anyone been able to get autocorrect/spelling working in English? There must be a plugin ?