On Thursday, February 13, 2020 at 10:58:01 PM UTC-5, andyjim wrote: > > A node for each zettel? Thousands of them? >
Well, yes, that's what I've been been envisioning. Having thousands of them - whether they are represented as Leo nodes or some other way - will require us to be smart at coming up with ways to work with them, and to find interesting related ones as well as the ones we've been working on recently. That would be true for the old paper system, too. With a computerized system, at least searches will be much faster. My experience with my bookmark management system makes me think that the zettels should be collected under headings that relate to the reason the zettel was written in the first place. The headings can be informal and changeable, and I found there is very little cognitive overhead in "filing" under one or another heading. In Leo, the headings could be implemented by creating organizer nodes. This does not commit you to a particular view of the world, but only gives you some mnemonic help in finding related thoughts. Leo itself has something like 300 or 400 files of code, most of them contained in one Leo file. Each code file would be equivalent to maybe dozens if not hundreds of individual "notes", if you wanted to think about them that way. That might in total be several tens of thousands - in the rough ballpark of the number of zettels we are imagining . It's not too unwieldy to work with them. Come to think of it, my bookmark management system, which I've mentioned before, has some 25,000 web pages, with more than a hundred top-level headings, not including all the subheadings. The cross-links are all between headings, though, not between individual pages. So the size and complexity of the bookmark collection is also in the ballpark of what we are looking at for the zettelkasten. What the Leo code doesn't have is the extensive system of cross links that we expect to have in our zettelkasten. That will be one of the key things we have to work out - not how to accomplish linking technically, but how to make it easy to work with. Just to make this seem a little more real, one thing you can do with Leo right now, without adding anything new, is this: you can "mark" any number of nodes, and then activate a single Leo command that makes clones of all of them and puts them under a single organizing node. So you could do a search, and then scan through the search results, mark the ones you want, and automatically collect clones of all of them in one place. I see this capability as a way to collect various thoughts into a project to work on. In addition to finding the notes to work on together, another challenging user interface issue will be to display a number of them at once, and in a readable (and maybe editable) way. That's never been easy on a computer. Leo does have the ability to open multiple editors, but the way that works won't, I think, be quite right for what we need to do. I've read that with the old paper system, people used to physically remove a number of zettels from their filing case (the *kasten*) and spread them out on a desk. When they were done, they'd have to get them all (with any new ones) back in the right place or they would never be able to find them again. We can do better than that, anyway. One approach that I think will be useful in finding zettels related to the ones you are thinking about is sometimes called a *Concise Bounded Description*. Basically, given a node, this collects all references of a chosen depth of links in one subset. See https://www.w3.org/Submission/CBD/ I think this is likely to lead to the other zettels one is most interested in. I'm fairly sure that a CBD won't be hard to implement. I've done it before. One way to display them would be be with a mind map - I'm very fond of mind maps, myself. Making a mind map that can interact with the rest of our zettelkasten system would be challenging. So a read-only mind map would be what we could expect for quite a while. Well, there I go getting into details of the user interface when we are still working on the requirements at a higher level. Fun and useful, but we shouldn't get carried away too soon! -- 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/bf5b429e-049b-45db-8693-3f2127b4561b%40googlegroups.com.
