202005072153

Path To Zettelkasten

caught the roamresearch bug, which caused me to drop everything else and start using it to dump everything
unfortunately, a few weeks after finding it, they hit a sudden surge in popularity, which essentially cripped their servers, and rendered my whole account obsolete.
at this point, I’m going crazy refreshing my browser every so often (and most definitely contributing to the server load).
actually, I should probably backtrack:
- I have tried almost all of the note-taking apps available on OSX. in the early days it was NotationalVelocity11 amazing piece of software that had the, at the time, revolutionary idea of basically having an omni-bar that did both search and note creation, so that if you typed in a title that wasn’t in your database, it would automatically create it. for some reason it’s always the little innovations that make a huge difference., which was a game-changer when it came out (and even earlier still, OmniOutliner). a prof showed me Workflowy, which I used for a while, and then moved to Dynalist, which ended up being my main repository for the longest while.
- in parallel, I’ve tried all the various writing apps: WriteRoom (the OG! good memories), Byword, IA Writer, Ulysses. I ended up sticking to IA Writer, though with these apps it’s definitely more the atmosphere that the minimalism created (which you can sort of replicate with the fullscreen in Sublime).
- the problem with Dynalist, and most things that I’ve used, is that at some point, things become unwiedly.
  - my folder of text files that I interfaced with using NV (and then nvALT), it became a black hole, littered with thousands of random snippets, with no structure (though fun to random browse and see the random things I wrote).
  - outliners, for all their ease, suffer from the problem of having to place notes in some physical location within your tree.
a month ago, I stumbled upon roamresearch, and immediately hit it off. It managed to be both an outliner, but also take on the philosophy of just having many, bite-sized notes, and it accomplished this by emphasizing the ability to link things together (like passing by reference).
- I don’t know why, but there was just something magical about the whole experience. I think a few (again small) things contributed to that feeling:
  - having an automatic daily notes (that would then populate all your previous notes, so you could just browse it easily) is something very simple, but made information insertion frictionless.22 and this is something I would like to recreate in my current setup.
  - linking notes and ideas together is right up my alley, and just a lot of fun, actually33 the whole thing about having an external brain, and their ambition to make it public, is less interesting to me.
I wanted a local, plain-text based version of roamresearch, but I doubted that I would be able to recreate one.
- it turns out that there are many people with the same idea. some people use something called org-mode.44 I spent a good chunk of time toying with the idea of learning emacs, but ultimately decided it was probably too much of a time-sink to go that route I then found a Sublime plugin (sublime_zk) that had a lot of similarities to roamresearch (back-links), and so I decided to repurpose my research blog to cater for this new note repo.
- crucially, I found a way to automatically generate backlinks (see below), which you can find here. I had to tweak the code to fit my specific use-case, but now it basically works flawlessly.
at this point, let’s see how things go with this. hopefully something good will come out of all this productivity hacking.

References

Here are some sources of inspiration.

Backlinks

[[how-to-take-smart-notes]]
- While exploring the various alternatives to roamresearch during the [[path-to-zettelkasten]], I ended up reading the book that explains the philosophy. I don’t remember the specifics (felt very much like one of those self-help books, except written by someone a little more competent). I am intrigued by the methodology of note taking that it espouses, so here’s a short summary: