Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

Re:Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead by kbenson on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @02:59AM (#23388412)

I'm confused as to why you find Obsidian not matching most those criteria. I heard about it here last week, and just installed it finally tonight, but as I understand it. It's just a bunch of markdown files in a folder on the local disk. That seems.pretty easy to access/convert, is private, is lightweight, and is future proof (I could write something in Perl to generate the graph in a night most likely).

I don't know anything about the others, since I haven't really used a note system before, so I can't comment on them. Your system seems to violate a few of your stated concerns though (is it cross compatible?), so I'm confused as to why you find it better.

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Re:Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @03:15PM (#23394968)

there have been reports of Obsidian breaking and deleting notes when removing bidirectional links. I’m not interested in something that isn’t 100% failsafe when my notes are on the line.

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Re:Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead by kbenson on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @03:28PM (#23395196)

That's worrying if true, but something hopefully they'll fix. I imagine deleting notes should be a fairly rare occurrence, so putting safeguards around it (such as a confirm, maybe moving note file to a trash location for later cleanup) is warranted.

Given what it is, it's probably safe and a good idea to make the vault on top of a versioned file system, even if that's a dropbox, google drive stream folder, or backblaze folder. It's probably not too hard to get a solution that's encrypted so it's more private as well.

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Re:Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @06:39PM (#23397324)

now you see why it quickly becomes complex, and I use the built-in editor which is as light as nano

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Re:Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead by kbenson on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @07:25PM (#23397750)

I still think replacing the document creation markdown handling with Obsidian, which also shows back-links and lets you easily follow links, is probably much more useful and efficient than to use a regular text editor and manually curate the folders and tagging.

You probably want versioning in all cases (your manual method or Obsidian), and it doesn't negate the benefit of a system that scans and builds a graph of your knowledge provides.

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