On Friday, January 31, 2020 at 4:54:50 AM UTC-5, vitalije wrote: > > There is one program that I immediately thought of after reading a few > pages about Zettelkasten: fossil <https://fossil-scm.org> and its wiki > feature. It is a single executable (a rather small one ~ 2-3Mb), that can > work on any platform. It supports tagging, timeline view. One can see the > history of any given note. With some basic Tcl programming one can easily > generate cross reference pages of links between notes. It is not overly > complicated to put the content of your repository online so that you can > access it from anywhere. It supports markdown format for writing wiki pages > (= notes). The whole archive content is in a single file which makes it > easy to copy from one computer to another. It is easy to clone entire > archive over the internet and work locally and later synchronize work with > the other archives/repositories. > > Now that I have actually gotten a couple of zettel-programs and thought about it some more, I'm convinced that the notes need to be kept out of databases and unduly specialized systems. Those may provide special features more easily and "efficiently", but when you are talking about the sum of someone's research and thinking for years or decades, they absolutely MUST be able to take the information and use it in some other way with some other method. I'm going to claim (I'm not the only one) that only simple text-format notes can do that.
Yes, fossil says they export an "archival" format that will be around and usable forever. But it's filled with hashes and metadata that the researcher doesn't want and can't use or even read. And issue tracking ticket systems are always finicky to use, and require the user to spend too much time in the machinery, which time does not contribute to the thinking process. With a set of text (including say Markdown) files, one can fall back to full text searches if no other system ends up working well enough. Or even to keeping a paper Zettel-box that refers to the text files by name, if you really had to. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/ed01b338-c5bc-4df7-affd-60494e89aab8%40googlegroups.com.
