Seems this issue needs a lot of thought. Niklas Luhmann's zettels had numerical ID numbers, without textual clues as to their content. And it was a paper system. And he certainly didn't work by remembering filenames (he had 75,000 zettels). I don't think it could have worked with textual, meaning-based filenames---not for that big a system (and I have the same problem, not on his scale but I will at least be in the 10s of thousands I think). How did he do it? Well, we know he had an indexing system, though we don't know much about it. And we know that his zettel ID numbering system itself created 'clusters', so the zettel IDs served as a sort of internal indexing system, which was in turn connected with his external indexing system (I'm assuming his indexing was external to the zettelkasten itself. The software zettelkasten systems I've seen simply generate a time-based numerical UID. Fine for the system, but gibberish to the user, so they do not employ Luhmann's type of indexing system. Maybe we need to figure out how to employ those principles. Maybe some sort of indexing system is what I'm fishing for when I talk about 'mapping'. I'm going to be thinking about this.
I understand your wanting individual text-based filenames, in order to be forward-compatible with an uncertain future. I get that and agree with the principle. But it appears to me that while that idea is forward-compatible it's not current-compatible with a software-based zettelkasten. How do we resolve this? Well, you suggested an optional, user-entered title as the UID. What if the system could (optionally) generate a separate file using the zettel title as the filename? The reason I say 'optionally' generate that file is that in my case I do intend to use titles, but they won't be unique. I might use the same title for a hundred different zettels, some on entirely different subjects. Hard to conceive? Well here's an example for a PIM system: a file called Books of Interest. Now suppose my PIM system covers a number of different categories, in each one of which I want a list of books of interest. In my system, which is a thoughts system, not a PIM system, there will be thoughts, concepts, ideas, themes that occur in many different contexts, hence the high likelihood of identical zettel titles in many contexts. That's why I need much more than just a simple filename in order to locate any given zettel in its full context, to say nothing of my inability to remember thousands of files. This is the magic of the zettelkasten system. So in my thinking, using a zettel's title for its UID won't work in this kind of system (maybe I should say in *my* use case of this kind of system). But, having said that, I certainly can buy into what I'm calling your forward-compatibility principle. So how about going with the best of both worlds, and provide an option to generate files by zettel title? They could be loaded into an archive as both a second copy of the files, and as a hedge against an unknown future. Or if you want, an *option *to use zettel titles as UIDs instead of having the system generate time-based UIDs (Let the system do it: I wouldn't want to type those in either). -- 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 leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/a2a01618-5d6b-48a8-b0a9-a4f830973e77%40googlegroups.com.
