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I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten
Dormouse:
I find it interesting that plain text / markdown solutions like Zettlr keep the files in a database.
WriteMonkey is the same (though documents can be bound to a file).-Dormouse (November 10, 2019, 06:02 AM)
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What struck me as interesting was simply the simultaneous desires for the 'virtue' of simple plain text approach and the functional advantages of a database.
.txt is good; .md or .mmd is equivalently good (despite the existence of contradictory forms of markdown and the need for dual pane (or alternate views) editors so that it's possible for most people to use it) and .rtf is bad (although the text in the file can be read quite easily).
wraith808:
From the WM2 documentationSTANDARD AND CLEAN TEXT FORMAT
For maximum portability your work is stored in standard text files. Writemonkey is fully UTF-8 compatible and will recognize virtually all international characters. Supports other encoding standards ‒ Unicode, ANSII …
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-wraith808 (November 13, 2019, 12:05 PM)
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They can make the same claim in WM3. It's a plain text database.
-Dormouse (November 13, 2019, 01:20 PM)
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WM2 doesn't involve the use of anything other than the files. There are no supporting files stored on your system. That's the difference. And it might be plain text, but that's pushing it. It's JSON, and definitely not what one thinks of when one says plain text.
However you do it, there are potential problems unless you simply want standalone files and rely on file management tools. But many people want the advantages that can be got from a database solution: eg text search, linking, tagging.
The WM3 file binding feature means that you can have both at the same time.
And the database can be read as text.
-Dormouse (November 13, 2019, 02:18 PM)
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You can do the same thing still keeping text files. This is just how they've chosen to do it. It's an approach and a design decision- it's not the only approach to solving that problem.
Dormouse:
For the reasons I stated at the beginning of the thread, I'm interested in a file based solution because I don't want to be reliant on any single database design (& other reasons). I'm quite happy to use databases, but I'd want the results in separate files reasonably speedily.
On that basis, I wouldn't use Zettlr. The files exist separately, but the tags and linking are tied up in the program.
I'd use WriteMonkey anyway for writing. But again tags and linking are tied up in the program.
Unique IDs and a text search program, might make them usable if the tags are unique strings.
Separate text files make a structure easier to rebuild, but it's not a complete protection. Though it is easier than extracting lots of bits from a single long text file.
So my zettelkasten solution has Unique IDs and tags in the file name with an indexed text search (made reasonably efficient by limiting the folders searched). And each file will be completely separate. The text search will be the only 'database'. I use a tags program, but won't be dependent on it.
wraith808:
How about some sort of plain text type wiki system? Ema Personal Wiki (https://jwbs-blog.blogspot.com/2010/09/ema-personal-wiki-for-android-and.html) allows you to use it for the wiki functionality and work on plain text files. I work on my wiki outside of the browsing system at times (because the editor is pretty old, and I like to use sublime), but it is very easy to create the links even in a plain text editor. It's open source, so when I get the time, I was going to add an option to use the editor of your choice instead of the internal editor.
Dormouse:
WM2 doesn't involve the use of anything other than the files. There are no supporting files stored on your system. That's the difference.-wraith808 (November 13, 2019, 02:49 PM)
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Where are the repository and backups and history kept if it's a files only program?
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