A lot of comments in this thread makes me wonder if Roam has successfully become an actual cult. Personal opinion, but it seems like Roam's core features are hard-to-invent (though all of those existed in different apps in different contexts) but easy-to-implement. Many early adopters are very unhappy seeing multiple alternatives pop up (some arguably offering better features) which subverts the 'my-notetaking-app-is-unique-and-better-than-yours' sense of superiority. I'm seeing people defending every aspect of Roam at a level that usually comes from cognitive dissonances.
If you're already using Emacs (or are willing to spend a few days learning and configuring things, with lifelong benefits), there is nothing that can beat org-roam. It has been discussed multiple times here on HN.
It’s still in development, but keep an eye on Athens (https://github.com/athensresearch/athens), an open-source self-hosted web app. The project’s plan is to have a usable MVP on August 1. (Disclaimer: I’m a contributor.)
Athens will allow importing of Roam databases and will support many of Roam’s features, such as blocks, pages, backlinks, and Roam markup syntax. Unlike Roam, Athens stores your database of notes on your local computer, since it is a self-hosted web app.
As a researcher I always appreciate to see new opportunities to organize my work and improve my routines. This system does seem interesting.
To this day though I've found that Zotero is unbeaten to keep everything organized. I collect all my notes and documents in the Zotero library, and I sync it on multiple devices by placing the Zotero files in a Dropbox folder.
In this way I can use whatever app I want to write the actual notes (MD, txt, docx, whatever). I organize the notes in Zotero "folders" and the documents of each note are stored in "sub-folders". The best thing is that these are not actual folders, so the same document, if relevant for multiple researches, can be placed in two or more folders/sub-folders etc.
This setup has worked for me for nearly 8 years, with over 50 publications and over 5000 documents in my Zotero library. And best of all, the only thing I'm actually paying for is Dropbox, which I would anyway and, IMHO, is totally worth it. But that's another story. And more importantly, to get things started one can rely on the free tier of Dropbox, so even that's free.
So as a researcher (which translates to little money to spare and high volumes of documents to manage), I find that to this date I still have to find a solution that beats my configuration. I would love though to discover new opportunities!
Your comment resonated strongly with me, for I am also a researcher who finds zotero and dropbox to be a very helpful combination. (I use dropbox to store PDFs of documents, rather than using zotero, because I already pay for dropbox and basically want to avoid the paperwork of yet another bill.)
However, I do not use zotero notes much at all (apart from taking notes on bibliographic elements), and so I am hoping you might write some more about the mechanics of how you do that.
I am particularly interested in how you handle cross-references. I tend to use markdown and wiki approaches, because they make it easy to have inline cross-references to other documents. Is there a way to do that with zotero notes, other than using the "Related:" and "Tags:" items at the bottom of a note?
Also, do you have hints on organizing folders of notes?
Since you've been doing this for years, I can bet that you have some great advice, and I hope you can spare the time to explain your procedures in a bit more detail.
As a researcher too, I understand exactly what you are saying. I prefer DevonThink[1] to Zotero for searching and organizing over tens of GB of data with tens of millions of words. Works with the native Mac filesystem, so you don't have to import into the app if you don't want to. Automatically archiving my entire email history is a huge plus. Finds everything in milliseconds. Mac only.
It's very versatile — it's got great image handling, for example, so you can use it for collecting visual materials, and easily browse as a gallery or as full-sized images. And I particularly love the built-in PDF support, which has everything you need — multiple reader views, annotations, table of contents, rotation, conversion, OCR, etc. Search is fast, multiple database support is great. And it's a very nice touch that you can combine the local database file support with cloud sync, although the mobile app could be better there.
It's worth noting that Devonthink does not have citation/reference management, so for scientists/adademics it's probably not an adequate replacement as Zotero, Endnote, Papers, etc.
Great points! I also use Zotero extensively. I used to store files on Box previously because of WebDAV but they dropped that support a year or two years ago.
Now I pay for unlimited storage on Zotero. This is for two reasons: 1) They recommended supporting them by buying storage rather than donating directly. Maybe it has changed now but I continue with my subscription, 2) I have several co-authors with whom I share my documents. Most of them don’t have a paid Zotero subscription. But shared folders don’t eat up their personal storage limit unlike Dropbox.
Zotero is a lifesaver for organising articles and documents. I also pay for storage as a way to support the project. Their new web-client is quite nice.
Dropbox (or any of the other syncing apps) as a syncing mechanism for other stuff is underrated IMO. I personally have notes, password manager database and a budget app database synced between devices and the amount of value I've derived from having everything automatically sync between devices is huge.
I wish more apps would take the wide availability of "magic syncing folders" into account when designing their data storage. (I know many VC funded apps would prefer to keep the data in house so it can be monetized, but there is less excuse for open source tools)
I don't like to involve cloud apps in my workflow because there is no guarantee when what will change and then break my workflow. I currently self host a simple note server[1]. Now cloud apps can help me sync these notes across my devices but I would rather prefer mapped drive than cloud sync.
I take notes from my mobile/desktop browser address bar or simply edit the files directly. No dependencies, no cloud storage, only files and no one can ever access them but me. Works like a charm for me.
I agree but there's no great cross-platform syncing solution yet, to my knowledge. Dropbox dropped all linux support except ext4, which is limiting. GDrive and OneDrive don't have a Linux Client. Nextcloud is neat, but still not very well supported (eg, by android apps).
The result is I'm using a mishmash of all those, and keep forgetting what is synced where.
I think dropbox (or any “magic folder” sync) is great as well.
YouNeedABudget used to do this and then “upgraded” to use their own proprietary service that charges $X/month.
I think it’s not just the data monetization, but that frequently data sync is the only feature that requires ongoing services. So if I write software and want to charge a monthly service fee, then data sync is where I can force the service.
Companies can do whatever they like, but jerk companies will make poor designs that require their own magic sync. Smart companies should fall back to a sync folder to allow self-run and just charge me for software.
I never understood how to do this. You just drag and drop a document, and after that only one consistent copy is maintained?
Also how do you have documents with inline images? Is it possible to cite other documents from zotero -- let us say you are creating a literature review?
Not sure what you mean by "documents with inline images", but yes, that's how it works. There's also a handy browser plugin to import web pages/pdfs into Zotero, with automatic metadata.
Yes, you can cite documents you have with zotero by having it generate a pre-formatted citation or a bibtex entry.
Little bit off topic, but I generated a zettelkasten from C2 Wiki. There is a zip file that you can download that has all the wiki entries from 2015[0] in html format. Used pandoc to convert to markdown and then did some sed scripting to fix the links and remove some boilerplate. I can open it on Obsidian and see that OnceAndOnlyOnce wiki entry has 1,470 backlinks. It's little bit slow and I can't open the Graph view, but otherwise it usable. Tried to open the folder with VSCode and then expanded backlinks sidebar. It resulted in "EMFILE: Too many open files". Is Foam using some custom logic for linking files together. I saw in inbox.md some auto-generated text for dealing with markdown links.
What I learned is that one folder with 36000 files is not a good idea.
What do Mind-mapping, Zettelkasten, Bullet Journaling, Getting Things Done, etc. all have in common?
They impose a taxonomy on thought and rely heavily on "best practices".
Even the simplest organizational schemes require a great deal of _discipline_ to be successful with, and nothing is a "one size fits all" solution.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can dump interesting thoughts (or links to articles, videos, whatever) into a "knowledge base" and it finds connections and labels things for me while I sleep.
The key thing is not discipline. It's to make it yours. It's easy to make a software that would link your thoughts or weblinks together one way or another, but it's impossible to make it just like you would.
There is no software that would piece different ideas together to come up with a new one. That is called AI and we are not there yet.
What you want is get the results without doing any actual work yourself. This is not a problem that any software could fix.
Concur, to rephrase it, it's not the software that must make connections while you sleep, but rather you must make connections and then transfer them to software. From there you can do spaced repetition or whatever to map those connections to a mental model. There are two friction points here: realizing what connections are made and then externally documenting the connections.
> dump interesting thoughts (or links to articles, videos, whatever) into a "knowledge base" and it finds connections and labels things for me while I sleep. ¶ Who's building this?
Mek from archive.org has recently decided to give it a shot.
Perhaps, but you could say the same thing about something like an `if` statement in the era of branch assembly instructions. One requires more discipline (and knowledge) but that doesn't mean the problem is solely a lack of willpower/discipline.
I'd love something like nvAlt that has zero hierarchy, but instead offloads to blazing-fast search. The problem with nvAlt is discovery so bolting on some smart filters like LRU, MRU that you can access through commands in the search bar plus a roam-style graph would help you move through the note space.
Then when you open a note, a side panel with back-links opens side by side with the note. Press a key command to flick between the search bar and the note, and update the side-panel whenever a new note is opened. This would be the perfect app for me.
This has always been the premise/promise of DevonThink, but I never found it quite hit the spot for me – I end up imposing organisation on it, and then we're back at your original complaint. Some users do absolutely swear by it, though.
You and me both. My thoughts on this subject are that all knowledge is related in some manner, so unless you want your knowledge points to form an all to all connection (useless), there needs to be some probabilistic connection.
This means that the user blanket accepts the probability that language is similar enough in two separate thoughts to form a connection, or they receive a basket of suggestions from a program and approve/disapprove each. One inevitably leads to meaningless connections, and the other leads to work on the user's part to prune out all the trash.
> I'm looking forward to the day when I can dump interesting thoughts (or links to articles, videos, whatever) into a "knowledge base" and it finds connections and labels things for me while I sleep.
>
> Who's building this?
I do and so do others. But this is not magic. Computers can't read your mind, they can't create perfect connections without the users guidance. A certain level of discipline will always be necessary. At the end you are the only one who knows what you know and need at a specific moment, any tool can only assist you in this.
What you're describing is essentially a recommendation system with an understanding of natural language. There's a lot of research going into it, but it's still a very difficult problem to solve.
I'm working on an app to solve the taxonomy problem at least! it's currently in very early development in a private repo but I'll make it public at https://github.com/pxeger/tome at some point
> dump interesting thoughts (or links to articles, videos, whatever) into a "knowledge base" and it finds connections and labels things for me while I sleep.
One more interesting tool for managing Zettlekasten-like notes is Neuron (https://github.com/srid/neuron). Static websites it generates show relations between viewed notes (scroll to top of https://neuron.zettel.page/2011506.html), support both "branching" and "non-branching" links, where the former provide structure for auto-generated index of zettels (https://neuron.zettel.page/2011504.html), plus they have integrated search and the whole app is pretty easy to set up using Nix. I really like the nicely polished interface and fact that it tries to have minimal effect on note format.
The trouble I see with this sort of approach (not Foam itself, but a general take on Obsidian, Zettelkasten, etc.) is that you quickly end up with a single folder with thousands of files, which makes it hard to manage, share, etc. Especially if you have diagrams or media associated with your entries.
It’s the same issue with static sites: you get a posts folder, dump everything in it, and then you dump all the images in an images folder and lose association between them.
I would much prefer if these tools took front matter metadata (or a pathname) to link to each other and had a note-per-folder approach (my own site does that, and I store images for each post in the same folder as “index.md”—the pathname becomes the final URL).
Foam author here! I am very open to all suggestions in this area. Foam is a new project I built solely to my own requirements, but I'm actively seeking feedback on how to make it more broadly applicable as per our principles:
https://foambubble.github.io/foam/principles
That would seal the deal for me. I have tens of thousands of documents, notes, pictures etc. spread across hundreds of subdirectories. Foam looks extremely promising.
I beg to differ. Having them all in one folder is actually exactly what I want.
Storing them into folders is just giving you problems. I would need to put them into many folders, to get any benefits, but than again, this could be done by tags so much more easily.
In the end there is no reason to directly manipulate the file structure. It is just easier to have a flat hierarchy. If I need to find something: there are tags, there is the graph, and of course there is a full text search.
I partially agree with you, but it's because I have a certain searching method that I'm comfortable with. I use sed/awk/grep quite a bit. The find command is also useful - but with those utilities, I can quickly search for any string or regular expression I need.
If I'm looking for the word cow in a doc that I think is in a folder (even if it's in subfolders), then I can do this:
grep --color=always -r "cow"
(I like setting color to always, and for some reason I'm too lazy to set up an alias so I don't have to type it)
I can get way more complicated by escaping spaces, looking for certain file types, etc.... really this does about the same as grep though - but still interesting:
find -name ".txt" -o -name ".md" -type f | sed 's/\ /\\\ /'g | xargs grep --color=always -n "cow"
Using these utilities, I've been able to find things in lots of lines of code, or lots of lines of md files.
Well, I do have around 8000 documents, and I organize them with a mix of hierarchy and tags (plus search). My entire site (taoofmac.com) was built that way, but the hierarchy was key - otherwise I would have trouble grouping and managing related things.
We have actually tried to mitigate this with our knowledge-base solution[1] by using multi-parent nesting in addition to hyperlinking + backlinks (zettelkasten).
On our platform, everything is a card (rather than a document), and if you want an actual structured hierarchy, you can nest cards inside other cards. Each card can have multiple parents, so if you are collaborating with others you can easily have the same "card" in different places to keep yourself organized. In that way it works similar to symbolic links in a filesystem, except it's nesting so there are no folders – just cards all the way down.
At the same time, because your cards are not actually siloed into different folders, we have things like the "home", which has all the cards you've ever made so that you can easily filter your entire library by tag / author / etc. and see all of those cards at once.
Unlike the OC solution, however, Supernotes is not self-hosted, and so probably isn't as appealing to a lot of the techie HN crowd.
Question: Do you have an option where your backend could be used to supply content to a frontend public website? Mind you, given your data structure, I'm not sure how that would work.
Let me give you an example. I like to read, mostly long form non-fiction (i.e., books). Naturally, I highlight things of importance. I want to take those ideas and get them into something where I can organize, add categories and tags, etc.
Yes. A basic WordPress site would be sufficient. But given a tool like yours, why not try to take up a level? On the backend, my "thoughts" well organized. The frontend some view of that I'd want to share with the public.
I’m [very] interested. I saw your app before, but it was during my looking at so many different apps, I didn’t look too much into it.
Being an HNer working on the product is a pretty big pro for me. Will be showing this specific comment to a few people for reference to Supernotes as well.
I think the whole point is to not have hierarchical folders because they make it harder to see connections between ideas.
But you can tag your ideas, or create "folder" notes that contain list of other notes.
And you can nest those notes or course, and even have loops in your graph, so it's more flexible than folders.
Also, for static sites, I use Jekyll and I create a folder for each post in the image directory. It's very convenient.
Well technically Luhmann grouped hits notes into "folders" by using multiple drawers. But that might be due to the space limitations you face in the real world. I wrote about the concept here: https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...
In Emvi [1] we built it so that you can mention an article (and everything else) anywhere and the title will get updated when the linked article is. In case you delete it there is a hint that it has been deleted.
I generally like to annotate or mark stuff instead of sorting them into folders to search through them later. It's by far easier to remember _what_ you're looking for than _where_ you can find it. If you're trying to find a place you have been to before, it's easier to remember a land mark next to it than the streets you have to drive down.
> It’s the same issue with static sites: you get a posts folder, dump everything in it, and then you dump all the images in an images folder and lose association between them.
Hugo is an exception, and a recent one at that (I followed the page bundles discussion with interest since I considered moving to it at one time, but relative link handling is still over-complex from my standpoint...)
I think that falls into a class of tradeoffs that using various tools involves. With a higher level of functionality the designer of the tool must make decisions about how to implement the functionality. They can provide options or configuration to tailor behavior to an individuals preferences but that increases friction when getting started with the tool.
I'm using a a much less capable tool for managing my notes called `mkdocs`. It converts a collection of markdown pages to HTML that I serve from a script running on a Raspberry Pi (`python3 -m http.server 8100`) `mkdocs` provides Github integration but I keep the repo on a private server so I don;t have to worry about private information leaking. Point is, It does nothing with directories so that is completely under my control. It links the pages hierarchically but I can insert links between pages and to images. Manually.
This is indeed a problem. But i think a big part of writing is organization. The organizational principles changes over time as the folder grows, and I refactor to realize new principles. For notes, this refactoring is healthy for me. It makes me realize things about my own thoughts.
Your point about managing the image resources associated with the markdown is an important one. Rather than one folder per note, the existing approach is compatible with a {file-slug}.resources/ naming scheme. Sounds like a good opportunity for another plugin.
That approach won’t fix the “thousands of files in a folder” problem. It will just add another: “thousands of subfolders”.
A full hierarchical approach (not just single level) is much better (believe me, I’ve been doing this for 16 years and have nearly 8000 notes/posts at taoofmac.com).
> It’s the same issue with static sites: you get a posts folder, dump everything in it, and then you dump all the images in an images folder and lose association between them.
If only that was limited to static site generators. Wordpress does not have any media organizing by default, no folders, no nothing. There are plugins, of course.
That was my biggest surprise when I recently looked at Wordpress.
Does vimwiki support the graph? That's the secret sauce really, I found https://obsidian.md a few days ago and have been obsessed with graph based knowledge storage since.
I'm looking for a graph based solution, too. For my master thesis I used diagrams.net, but it's not a long term solution. I need something with markdown support, git, offline mode and hopefully for free.
VimWiki nicely integrates with a Vim centric toolchain and is functionally similar to the Markdown Notes extension for VS Code used by Foam.
Foam looks like a very thin layer built on top of existing VS Code extensions. It integrates with a template generated GitHub repository. If it hasn’t been done already, I imagine a “VimWikiHub” layer to be equally useful.
It really depends on your toolchain preferences and whether you want to integrate with a GutHub repo.
Glad to see that this exists and is under such promising development -- the tool looks like a perfect fit for my needs! I like working in the VSCode environment and I've been looking for the right tool for my Zettelkasten. Will definitely give this a shot once the subfolder linking gets added, that's a must for me given the structure of my Zettelkasten.
Readit News
Athens will allow importing of Roam databases and will support many of Roam’s features, such as blocks, pages, backlinks, and Roam markup syntax. Unlike Roam, Athens stores your database of notes on your local computer, since it is a self-hosted web app.
To this day though I've found that Zotero is unbeaten to keep everything organized. I collect all my notes and documents in the Zotero library, and I sync it on multiple devices by placing the Zotero files in a Dropbox folder.
In this way I can use whatever app I want to write the actual notes (MD, txt, docx, whatever). I organize the notes in Zotero "folders" and the documents of each note are stored in "sub-folders". The best thing is that these are not actual folders, so the same document, if relevant for multiple researches, can be placed in two or more folders/sub-folders etc.
This setup has worked for me for nearly 8 years, with over 50 publications and over 5000 documents in my Zotero library. And best of all, the only thing I'm actually paying for is Dropbox, which I would anyway and, IMHO, is totally worth it. But that's another story. And more importantly, to get things started one can rely on the free tier of Dropbox, so even that's free.
So as a researcher (which translates to little money to spare and high volumes of documents to manage), I find that to this date I still have to find a solution that beats my configuration. I would love though to discover new opportunities!
However, I do not use zotero notes much at all (apart from taking notes on bibliographic elements), and so I am hoping you might write some more about the mechanics of how you do that.
I am particularly interested in how you handle cross-references. I tend to use markdown and wiki approaches, because they make it easy to have inline cross-references to other documents. Is there a way to do that with zotero notes, other than using the "Related:" and "Tags:" items at the bottom of a note?
Also, do you have hints on organizing folders of notes?
Since you've been doing this for years, I can bet that you have some great advice, and I hope you can spare the time to explain your procedures in a bit more detail.
Thanks.
[1] https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink
It's very versatile — it's got great image handling, for example, so you can use it for collecting visual materials, and easily browse as a gallery or as full-sized images. And I particularly love the built-in PDF support, which has everything you need — multiple reader views, annotations, table of contents, rotation, conversion, OCR, etc. Search is fast, multiple database support is great. And it's a very nice touch that you can combine the local database file support with cloud sync, although the mobile app could be better there.
It's worth noting that Devonthink does not have citation/reference management, so for scientists/adademics it's probably not an adequate replacement as Zotero, Endnote, Papers, etc.
Now I pay for unlimited storage on Zotero. This is for two reasons: 1) They recommended supporting them by buying storage rather than donating directly. Maybe it has changed now but I continue with my subscription, 2) I have several co-authors with whom I share my documents. Most of them don’t have a paid Zotero subscription. But shared folders don’t eat up their personal storage limit unlike Dropbox.
I wish more apps would take the wide availability of "magic syncing folders" into account when designing their data storage. (I know many VC funded apps would prefer to keep the data in house so it can be monetized, but there is less excuse for open source tools)
I take notes from my mobile/desktop browser address bar or simply edit the files directly. No dependencies, no cloud storage, only files and no one can ever access them but me. Works like a charm for me.
[1]: https://github.com/quaintdev/pinotes
The result is I'm using a mishmash of all those, and keep forgetting what is synced where.
YouNeedABudget used to do this and then “upgraded” to use their own proprietary service that charges $X/month.
I think it’s not just the data monetization, but that frequently data sync is the only feature that requires ongoing services. So if I write software and want to charge a monthly service fee, then data sync is where I can force the service.
Companies can do whatever they like, but jerk companies will make poor designs that require their own magic sync. Smart companies should fall back to a sync folder to allow self-run and just charge me for software.
Also how do you have documents with inline images? Is it possible to cite other documents from zotero -- let us say you are creating a literature review?
Yes, you can cite documents you have with zotero by having it generate a pre-formatted citation or a bibtex entry.
Deleted Comment
What I learned is that one folder with 36000 files is not a good idea.
0 - https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501
They impose a taxonomy on thought and rely heavily on "best practices".
Even the simplest organizational schemes require a great deal of _discipline_ to be successful with, and nothing is a "one size fits all" solution.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can dump interesting thoughts (or links to articles, videos, whatever) into a "knowledge base" and it finds connections and labels things for me while I sleep.
Who's building this?
There is no software that would piece different ideas together to come up with a new one. That is called AI and we are not there yet.
What you want is get the results without doing any actual work yourself. This is not a problem that any software could fix.
Mek from archive.org has recently decided to give it a shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3W7rU_xKKc
Which I think means: all that's needed is discipline. Which organizational scheme you use (if any) is almost irrelevant.
The useful question is then: which methods help building discipline?
Then when you open a note, a side panel with back-links opens side by side with the note. Press a key command to flick between the search bar and the note, and update the side-panel whenever a new note is opened. This would be the perfect app for me.
This means that the user blanket accepts the probability that language is similar enough in two separate thoughts to form a connection, or they receive a basket of suggestions from a program and approve/disapprove each. One inevitably leads to meaningless connections, and the other leads to work on the user's part to prune out all the trash.
What do you think?
I do and so do others. But this is not magic. Computers can't read your mind, they can't create perfect connections without the users guidance. A certain level of discipline will always be necessary. At the end you are the only one who knows what you know and need at a specific moment, any tool can only assist you in this.
Mark Berenstein is one of the original Hypertext pioneers and has built a fantastic tool for notes.
http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
This and DevonThink are the only reasons I remain on a Mac.
I think you just described dreaming.
Dead Comment
It’s the same issue with static sites: you get a posts folder, dump everything in it, and then you dump all the images in an images folder and lose association between them.
I would much prefer if these tools took front matter metadata (or a pathname) to link to each other and had a note-per-folder approach (my own site does that, and I store images for each post in the same folder as “index.md”—the pathname becomes the final URL).
FWIW, subdirectory linking support is not far away. Work is being tracked on GitHub at the issue below, and I already have a WIP PR in the works: https://github.com/foambubble/foam-vscode/issues/8
If you have any more suggestions and ideas on how to improve Foam, feel free to open issues on GitHub!
Storing them into folders is just giving you problems. I would need to put them into many folders, to get any benefits, but than again, this could be done by tags so much more easily.
In the end there is no reason to directly manipulate the file structure. It is just easier to have a flat hierarchy. If I need to find something: there are tags, there is the graph, and of course there is a full text search.
If I'm looking for the word cow in a doc that I think is in a folder (even if it's in subfolders), then I can do this:
grep --color=always -r "cow"
(I like setting color to always, and for some reason I'm too lazy to set up an alias so I don't have to type it)
I can get way more complicated by escaping spaces, looking for certain file types, etc.... really this does about the same as grep though - but still interesting:
find -name ".txt" -o -name ".md" -type f | sed 's/\ /\\\ /'g | xargs grep --color=always -n "cow"
Using these utilities, I've been able to find things in lots of lines of code, or lots of lines of md files.
On our platform, everything is a card (rather than a document), and if you want an actual structured hierarchy, you can nest cards inside other cards. Each card can have multiple parents, so if you are collaborating with others you can easily have the same "card" in different places to keep yourself organized. In that way it works similar to symbolic links in a filesystem, except it's nesting so there are no folders – just cards all the way down.
At the same time, because your cards are not actually siloed into different folders, we have things like the "home", which has all the cards you've ever made so that you can easily filter your entire library by tag / author / etc. and see all of those cards at once.
Unlike the OC solution, however, Supernotes is not self-hosted, and so probably isn't as appealing to a lot of the techie HN crowd.
[1] https://supernotes.app
Question: Do you have an option where your backend could be used to supply content to a frontend public website? Mind you, given your data structure, I'm not sure how that would work.
Let me give you an example. I like to read, mostly long form non-fiction (i.e., books). Naturally, I highlight things of importance. I want to take those ideas and get them into something where I can organize, add categories and tags, etc.
Yes. A basic WordPress site would be sufficient. But given a tool like yours, why not try to take up a level? On the backend, my "thoughts" well organized. The frontend some view of that I'd want to share with the public.
Thoughts?
Being an HNer working on the product is a pretty big pro for me. Will be showing this specific comment to a few people for reference to Supernotes as well.
But you can tag your ideas, or create "folder" notes that contain list of other notes. And you can nest those notes or course, and even have loops in your graph, so it's more flexible than folders.
Also, for static sites, I use Jekyll and I create a folder for each post in the image directory. It's very convenient.
That's not a bug, but a feature of Zettelkasten.
I generally like to annotate or mark stuff instead of sorting them into folders to search through them later. It's by far easier to remember _what_ you're looking for than _where_ you can find it. If you're trying to find a place you have been to before, it's easier to remember a land mark next to it than the streets you have to drive down.
[1] https://emvi.com/
Not with page bundles in Hugo: https://gohugo.io/content-management/organization/
I'm using a a much less capable tool for managing my notes called `mkdocs`. It converts a collection of markdown pages to HTML that I serve from a script running on a Raspberry Pi (`python3 -m http.server 8100`) `mkdocs` provides Github integration but I keep the repo on a private server so I don;t have to worry about private information leaking. Point is, It does nothing with directories so that is completely under my control. It links the pages hierarchically but I can insert links between pages and to images. Manually.
A full hierarchical approach (not just single level) is much better (believe me, I’ve been doing this for 16 years and have nearly 8000 notes/posts at taoofmac.com).
If only that was limited to static site generators. Wordpress does not have any media organizing by default, no folders, no nothing. There are plugins, of course.
That was my biggest surprise when I recently looked at Wordpress.
edit: it has!
Foam looks like a very thin layer built on top of existing VS Code extensions. It integrates with a template generated GitHub repository. If it hasn’t been done already, I imagine a “VimWikiHub” layer to be equally useful.
It really depends on your toolchain preferences and whether you want to integrate with a GutHub repo.