Author Topic: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten (Read 470302 times)

Dormouse · « **Reply #600 on:** July 09, 2020, 04:28 PM »

GitJournal has just added wiki style links for compatibility with Foam, Obsidian etc.
-Dormouse (July 09, 2020, 01:53 PM)

Had a quick look. Not super impressed. Doesn't use the syntax that works elsewhere for colour and font size. Didn't see the wikilink working.
Loads of premium features, including backlinks, for £2.09 a month.
I'm not short of markdown apps and I'm not sure I want another anyway.

panzer · « **Reply #601 on:** July 09, 2020, 08:52 PM »

What’s Wrong with Markdown?
https://www.adamhyde...wrong-with-markdown/

Dormouse · « **Reply #602 on:** July 10, 2020, 04:47 AM »

What’s Wrong with Markdown?
https://www.adamhyde...wrong-with-markdown/
-panzer (July 09, 2020, 08:52 PM)

I enjoyed reading this, but it stopped so quickly.
I think he could make it a weekly blog for a few years and then bundle it up into a book.

wraith808 · « **Reply #603 on:** July 10, 2020, 08:27 AM »

It just looks like fluff predisposed towards an opinion rather than a truly unbiased piece.

panzer · « **Reply #604 on:** July 10, 2020, 11:47 AM »

Using Vim Wiki - The best note-taking solution I've found so far:
https://thelinell.com/using-vimwiki/

panzer · « **Reply #605 on:** July 11, 2020, 12:49 AM »

Taking notes on Tiago Forte's Just-in-Time Project Management:
http://reganmian.net...te-taking-with-roam/

Beyond Taking Notes (or how I joined the #roamcult):
https://dev.to/tmhal...ed-the-roamcult-22k3

Metaroam:
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/metaroam

wraith808 · « **Reply #606 on:** July 11, 2020, 11:22 AM »

So, one thing I found out about using VS code for editing- the editor isn't actually plain text. I was writing up some e-mails in response to a couple of action items that I had in a note, planning to transfer it to gmail to send. When I copied and pasted the text, it came in formatted like it is in VS Code. Just thought it was a jarring thing that some might find interesting. In no way a deal breaker, but just something to be aware of.

superboyac · « **Reply #607 on:** July 12, 2020, 04:13 PM »

So, one thing I found out about using VS code for editing- the editor isn't actually plain text. I was writing up some e-mails in response to a couple of action items that I had in a note, planning to transfer it to gmail to send. When I copied and pasted the text, it came in formatted like it is in VS Code. Just thought it was a jarring thing that some might find interesting. In no way a deal breaker, but just something to be aware of.
-wraith808 (July 11, 2020, 11:22 AM)

that's super weird. Kind of cool, if it could be a feature you can manually control.

superboyac · « **Reply #608 on:** July 12, 2020, 04:40 PM »

What’s Wrong with Markdown?
https://www.adamhyde...wrong-with-markdown/
-panzer (July 09, 2020, 08:52 PM)

I enjoyed reading this, but it stopped so quickly.
I think he could make it a weekly blog for a few years and then bundle it up into a book.
-Dormouse (July 10, 2020, 04:47 AM)

yes indeed lol.

I find Markdown attractive for writing on the computer. The guy has good points.
Part of the attraction is that developers have been trying to use markdown to create nice gui's for writing, like zettlr. It's very satisfying to see all the colors and headings change by putting the pound or asterisk symbol, etc.

It's nice that a lot of people have latched on to the format, and we all feel we can use these text files to get around in life. I think part of this guy's comments doesn't appreciate the aesthetics of the writing community.

But again, on a technical level, he has points...and I have struggled very much with the conversion of documents.

My dream is that something like markdown text files can be used to create live websites, similar to what andy matsuchack has going on in his blog that he won't share with anyone.

from the website perspective...i can't stand how big of a beast wordpress is when 90% of what i want to do is covered by markdown files. I just want to sync markdown files to a server and have a website created around that, i think it would be great and so would a lot of others. I just don't think the formatting issues this guy mentions is that big a deal. So you write a conversion thing using css to customize the markdown styles. so what? That's easy and people would LOVE that.

html and wysiwig html editors are similar too, but they never took off like this. rtf was sort of supposed to be like markdown.

but the idea of self contained, formatted plain text documents is VERY attractive. Html or markdown, but markdown is frankly more smooth.

i would ask everyone who is obsessed with this like me to think back on the evolution of all this (from a note taking perspective, not programming)....
we've seen (even right here on these discussion forums) how evernote took off and evolved. This idea of not being able to move notes easily in and out of software is a huge pain, and like the OP here, we want to avoid this forever. I loved evernote, but hated this particular aspect of it. And they are all like that.

plain text files --> good looking website
whoever does this nicely will be king.

wraith808 · « **Reply #609 on:** July 12, 2020, 08:29 PM »

My dream is that something like markdown text files can be used to create live websites, similar to what andy matsuchack has going on in his blog that he won't share with anyone.
-superboyac (July 12, 2020, 04:40 PM)

This is already a reality.

I currently use it on my site with Pico. There's also Postachio which does the same with files in Evernote, and Jekyll. I'm sure there are others, but those three have distinct differences so I posted those (and they're the ones I've used- go figure).

Pico generates the files on the fly. I upload Markdown, and it stays as Markdown. It's just rendered in the browser.

Postachio grabs the Markdown files from an Evernote folder. I suppose for all intents and purposes, since it's Markdown in Evernote, it does the same as Pico, other than the fact that your Markdown notes are in Evernote.

Jekyll is a static site generator. You run it, it generates the site in a folder that you upload as is to your site.

I personally settled on Pico as I don't have to generate the site, and I have the plain files as text files that I can do whatever I want with, and the source is on the server.

superboyac · « **Reply #610 on:** July 13, 2020, 01:47 AM »

Pico generates the files on the fly. I upload Markdown, and it stays as Markdown. It's just rendered in the browser.
-wraith808 (July 12, 2020, 08:29 PM)

PICO FOR THE WIN!! awesome...i swear i searched for hours sheesh

Dormouse · « **Reply #611 on:** July 13, 2020, 05:17 AM »

I find Markdown attractive for writing on the computer. The guy has good points.
Part of the attraction is that developers have been trying to use markdown to create nice gui's for writing, like zettlr. It's very satisfying to see all the colors and headings change by putting the pound or asterisk symbol, etc.

It's nice that a lot of people have latched on to the format, and we all feel we can use these text files to get around in life. I think part of this guy's comments doesn't appreciate the aesthetics of the writing community.

But again, on a technical level, he has points...and I have struggled very much with the conversion of documents.
-superboyac (July 12, 2020, 04:40 PM)

I think he's writing out of long experience and frustration.
And he's right in that markdown was devised for techies - programmers and web writers of the day. Thats why code blocks have a degree of precedence. And it doesn't have many features, like colour, that some writers use: random acceptance of different HTML is frustrating. As is random acceptance of bits from other languages like YAML. It's like a bicycle invented by a carpenter, the idea is good but it's stuffed with issues that many feel they can solve with a bit of bodging; and competing carpenters conventions which decide which bodges should be used more widely.

And all the previews and wysiwygs depend on a conversion to HTML, which conversion is inconsistent, as he points out.

Most of the time it doesn't matter to me. I'm usually quite happy with text. But it depends what I'm doing. I'm used to using multi colour highlighting when I'm editing or reviewing, but colour use is reserved for syntax in a text editor (otherwise they'd compete). I'm used to sophisticated tables in some areas of writing; there are some fairly easy primitive editors, like Typora, but generally much easier to produce tables in a word processor.

Dormouse · « **Reply #612 on:** July 13, 2020, 05:24 AM »

plain text files --> good looking website
-superboyac (July 12, 2020, 04:40 PM)

Markdown should certainly be good at this. It's part of what it was designed for and most websites accept markdown. PICO looks like a reasonable option for designing a website purely for your own documents, though there's a lot of techie type setting up. Obsidian will be adding it as a (paid) option in the next few months, but I think it will need to be simpler for many users (many Obsidian users appear to be programmers, IT students or techie other - but many are at the other end of the techie spectrum).

wraith808 · « **Reply #613 on:** July 13, 2020, 09:35 AM »

PICO looks like a reasonable option for designing a website purely for your own documents
-Dormouse (July 13, 2020, 05:24 AM)

Why do you say 'purely for your own documents'?

Dormouse · « **Reply #614 on:** July 13, 2020, 10:14 AM »

Why do you say 'purely for your own documents'?
-wraith808 (July 13, 2020, 09:35 AM)

Poor phrasing.
I meant it as a way of making a website out of your documents rather than uploading your documents into a website. It was an assumption that it worked like that.

I've mostly converted my websites to WP because of its ubiquity. Which, in turn, makes it easier to manage security because attack mechanisms are usually identified fairly quickly.

wraith808 · « **Reply #615 on:** July 13, 2020, 10:24 AM »

Actually, I upload them to the website in the folder structure. The one for making a website out of your documents would be more akin to Jekyll or Postachio.

Dormouse · « **Reply #616 on:** July 13, 2020, 10:55 AM »

The PICO way sounds more convenient for most. Usual request seems simply to be an option for sharing.

I'm not sure about me. I'll probably stick to WP for now. Maybe I'll look at a few websites, but I feel I've done enough changing for now.

panzer · « **Reply #617 on:** July 13, 2020, 03:24 PM »

Dendron is a local-first, markdown based, hierarchical note-taking application built on top of VSCode and friends:
https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron

wraith808 · « **Reply #618 on:** July 13, 2020, 04:55 PM »

Dendron is a local-first, markdown based, hierarchical note-taking application built on top of VSCode and friends:
https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron
-panzer (July 13, 2020, 03:24 PM)

Not using it wholesale, but there were some really good extensions that I'd not seen. I've found that the major advantage of using VS code- the fact that I can mix and match functionality.

From this one, I am using:

Paste Image - https://marketplace....n.vscode-paste-image
- lets you directly paste an image into the document, and it will create the image file and insert the link.
Markdown Shortcuts - https://marketplace....n.markdown-shortcuts
- adds a lot of shortcuts for commonly used commands to the command line. Also does some pretty interesting formatting of pre-existing text.

superboyac · « **Reply #619 on:** July 13, 2020, 11:04 PM »

Dendron is a local-first, markdown based, hierarchical note-taking application built on top of VSCode and friends:
https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron
-panzer (July 13, 2020, 03:24 PM)

Not using it wholesale, but there were some really good extensions that I'd not seen. I've found that the major advantage of using VS code- the fact that I can mix and match functionality.

From this one, I am using:

Paste Image - https://marketplace....n.vscode-paste-image
- lets you directly paste an image into the document, and it will create the image file and insert the link.
Markdown Shortcuts - https://marketplace....n.markdown-shortcuts
- adds a lot of shortcuts for commonly used commands to the command line. Also does some pretty interesting formatting of pre-existing text.
-wraith808 (July 13, 2020, 04:55 PM)

Man, I have to say I am VERY impressed by the slick interfaces these people are coming up with. It's like you want all the good bits of each in one.

Dormouse · « **Reply #620 on:** July 14, 2020, 05:49 AM »

Regex arrives in Obsidian v0.8 (done but not public yet).
Speed of development is ~~massive~~ - doesn't work, high mass implies lower speed - staggering. I spend more time catching up than actually doing anything.

wraith808 · « **Reply #621 on:** July 14, 2020, 09:48 AM »

Man, I have to say I am VERY impressed by the slick interfaces these people are coming up with. It's like you want all the good bits of each in one.
-superboyac (July 13, 2020, 11:04 PM)

Exactly. And the cool thing is that since they are componentized in extensions, you can have the best of each!

sphere · « **Reply #622 on:** July 14, 2020, 10:55 AM »

This is a solution someone developed about 4 years ago to map markdown files. Thought you might be interested. A really nice write up.

...Markdown Mapper, and is a command-line utility, written in R (see below) and open-sourced under the GPLv2 license, that reverse-engineers concept maps from plaintext notes.

Markdown Mapper

How it works

Markdown Mapper treats each line / paragraph of text as a node in the network. It goes through the text, file-by-file and then line-by-line, making inferences about which lines are related to which other lines by looking at tags and text structure (e.g., with the indentation of list-items). As it goes, it creates an edge list, a table with three columns: From, To, and Relationship, where the From and To columns are lines of text from the input file(s), and the Relationship column is the relationship between them (e.g., Parent, List item, Tag, Contains Type of Thought, etc.). It then uses the qgraph package to draw a quick-view graph from the edge list, and the igraph package to create an adjacency matrix (a tablular version of an edge list, where the row and column names are lines of text from the input file(s), and each cell has a 1 wherever the lines have a relationship), if the user has asked for one.

As it goes along, Markdown Mapper also hard-wraps the text Hard-wrapping = inserting a line break. every 20 or so characters, in order to make the text nodes more rectangular (this keeps each node from displaying as one long line of text).

panzer · « **Reply #623 on:** July 19, 2020, 07:17 AM »

Tired of note-taking apps:
https://akkshaya.blo...0/07/19/note-taking/

Attronarch · « **Reply #624 on:** July 19, 2020, 11:00 AM »

I've been using Zettlr for my zettelkasten. I started it in January this year and have so far written 713 notes.

Forgive me for I haven't read all 25 pages of this topic, but it seems to me like discussion here is mostly around note taking software and not zettelkasten as a method?