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I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

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Dormouse:
I actually use multiple desktop applications ... I use obsidian, tangent, vscode mostly.  this is all primarily markdown stuff.  For catch all archival purposes, I put everything in trilium

For work purposes when i need to collaborate with less techy people, i've started using Notion.

For static generated sites, I first started using emanote, but then moved to Docusaurus.  I think Docusaurus is beautiful.
-superboyac (March 07, 2024, 06:55 PM)
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Sounds good.
& nice to hear from you!  :)

I haven't gotten good at atomicity type writing yet, but do plan on going more in that direction as it will help in putting together longer form writings more easily.
-superboyac (March 07, 2024, 06:55 PM)
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I'd ask why. You've been going well without it. I don't think it automatically makes it easier to construct longform: it depends on what you're doing; how you do the putting together; how you take the initial, potentially atomic, notes. I'm not absolutely sure Luhmann was 100% atomic - I haven't read all his cards; Beatrice Webb certainly was.

Most of my notes probably are atomic, without being short, but it would certainly be possible to argue that that they could be split. Like a diamond is atomic, but has many facets, at least after being cut.

I do not think we need to stick so strictly to the original paper based zettel method with the numbers and stuff because the software and yaml covers that pretty well now, and I found it more of a hindrance at this point.  So i've loosened up on that a lot.
-superboyac (March 07, 2024, 06:55 PM)
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I;m not sure what you mean by the numbers. Luhmann's numbering was primarily to preserve his sequences; I'd argue that sequence is essential. Also it is as a UID, and that's what most zkn programs have by using a date/time stamp. I'm not convinced that they help at all except for linking - and there are other ways of doing that.
But I suspect that the main reason you have loosened up is that you're not using notes as a zettelkasten - and there's no reason why you should because there are many note-taking methodologies and all have their uses.

Wearing an academic hat, I'd typically read 20-50 journals in an hour or two. Naturally this involved a lot of scanning, skimming and skipping, with the occasional check on detail and more rarely a deep dive. I'm quite clear in my own mind that typical obsidian-like systems would produce little value except for the last group. I'm not sure how much I'd want to use a zettelkasten approach for that group, but for all the others it would be essential to create useful notes. The process is like going through a haystack finding individual interesting straws, but the value comes entirely form placing them in sequences, whereas the deep dive value is always mostly in the clump. I'm not sure this was entirely the case for Luhmann - he seems always to have been most interested in what he might write and may have selected and moulded straws entirely on that basis. oc that's just nuance.

And having got a system that works to do it, I can see that it can be applied to anything where building chains is the key process. The plural being key - if you are building one chain your needs are quite different from working simultaneously on 1000 without a blueprint and with the need to do crosslinks from time to time.

I think that one of the problems with zettelkasten discussions is that the focus is always on the notes, and there's only som much anyone can say about that without adding lots of ideas of their own. There's very little discussion about the decisions involved in chain-making, and oc it's irrelevant anyway if your system doesn't make chains.

Dormouse:
I also read a post on the Workflowy Slack from user Frank G - “I have been using Msft Word for Mac  (Windows before) for as long as I can remember. I have also played with Craft, Ulysses , Scrivener, Speare, Author , Typora , all excellent alternatives. Today WF finally ate them all up too for my long form docs . The blank page with a few basic formatting choices plus WF’s speed (once opened) , simplicity, and flexibility, has made WF my go to choice for long form doc drafts . I will still need to export to Word (or Craft)  for final formatting and PDF conversion, but 95% of my time I will be with WF .”

Essentially this refers to the Roamlike feature where bullets can transform into text blocks. Logsec has had this for some time too.
It struck me that it might be worth comparing the editors in (some of) the apps that I use, what makes them good and how Upnote compares.
-Dormouse (February 29, 2024, 06:37 PM)
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I did a short experiment using Workflowy like this - I thought it might be easier if I'm already using it for short zettelkasten notes. Being able to move blocks around is certainly an advantage in some notes/articles where there's a bit of brainstorming and of puzzling through to a, hopefully, coherent outcome. But found I hated it.

A bullet always showed on any section where the mouse was hovering.
And, worse, all the bullets that potentially go lower in the hierarchy remain visible. Can be solved with hoisting and folding etc, but not ideal.
Neither Upnote nor markdown editors help here because they don't allow blocks to be dragged. But OneNote is fine. and easy to put a link in Workflowy, and will also export to .md.

From a writing pov, what Workflowy is good at is brainstorming/organising/constructing using bullets as headings and notes as text. Options to view as bullets, kanban or cards. Exports cleanly to Mindomo, which then exports cleanly to Word. A good workflow once I switched to Word.

Upnote is fine, but has nothing that improves this workflow. It exports to markdown and HTML, but that's not quite as good as a direct export to docx (for me). Longform note writing is okay, but not as nice as Tangent. Its big advantage is mobile. And decent webclips for those who don't have other established workflows for them.

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