Bingo! I had a brainstorm. Now I know how we can use Leo to write text
zettels, have them organized in a tree of files on disk - for almost no
effort - and then use them in my bookmark manager. We can have - right
now, today - enough of zettelkasten functionality to start actually trying
it out, so we can learn how best to author zettels and organize them, and
have the bookmark manager link them up and provide the GUI. The manager
has some limitations, but we can either add functionality to it, or write
code for Leo to do some of the additional things we want - as we use the
system and find out what we really need. And the zettels are automatically
saved as text files, as we said we want.
In a previous post, I pointed out that the bookmark manager is a bit of a
beast to set up. Once it's set up, it just quietly works. If other people
want to try this thing out, I will have to spend some time working out how
to make it easier to get going.
Here is the how you make it all happen. The zettels are to be written in
Restructured Text format (RsT), which can be just plain text. In the Leo
outline of the zettelkasten, outline heading nodes have to start with
*"@path"*, and zettel nodes have to start with *"@rst"*. This is not a
large burden, to add these directives to the node title. Remember that the
bookmark manager does much of its magic by using the heading titles -
basically they are organizing thoughts. So it pays to come up with good
names for them.
So a zettelkasten tree might look like this:
@path zettels
@rst zettel basics
@rst linking zettels
@path zettels and creativity
@rst ...
@path note-taking
@rst note-taking techniques
@rst zettelkasten are not for taking notes at a lecture
@path software
@rst ...
To create or update the tree on disk, you run the Leo command *"rst3"*.
Leo will create or update the entire tree for you.
To process this tree for the bookmark manager, you just run a batch file,
for example by double clicking it. Or we could create a Leo button to run
it.
To get the updated data into the bookmarks manager, you just reload it.
With RsT, you can set up links between zettels or parts of them. It's a
manual process, but at some point it ought to be possible to write a plugin
to help, much like the *backlinks* plugin (if we made links with the *backlinks
*plugin, the bookmark manager would have no way to know about them).
As an additional benefit of doing things this way, The entire collection of
notes or a subset could be converted by Sphinx to a lovely, readable
cross-linked set of web files, for almost no more effort. The process can
be launched by another leo command or button.
I'm stoked, let me tell you!
On Friday, February 21, 2020 at 12:42:23 AM UTC-5, Thomas Passin wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thursday, February 20, 2020 at 10:38:19 PM UTC-5, Thomas Passin wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, February 20, 2020 at 9:37:43 AM UTC-5, andyjim wrote:
>>
>>> On Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at 11:35:05 PM UTC-5, Thomas Passin
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>
>> 3. I *think* that by using Firefox, you can use the manager without
>> running a web server. Most other browsers won't let you do it (they all
>> worked without a server back when I developed it, in the 2003-2004 time
>> frame, but no longer). So if you don't want to use Firefox, we'll have to
>> set you up with a web server on your computer.
>>
>
> Good news - the bookmark manager will definitely run right from the file
> system, no server required. That's in Firefox. This has the advantage that
> it can not only display links to, but also load file system files into a
> browser tab. This means that one could actually use it as a partial
> zettelkasten by writing text files into a directory tree, one note per
> file. The smarts would come from the names of the directories - consider
> them to be something like tags. What it wouldn't provide in its present
> state is direct links from one zettel to another, and searching by time of
> the zettel. It will, however, search by the heading (directory or tag)
> names. The headings can have any number of nested levels, which is
> equivalent to the original paper system of identifying them by a code that
> gives the position of a zettel in the filing box.
>
> And you *can* in fact link one of these zettels to another - with the
> existing system - and have that link be clickable (backlinks aren't
> provided, though). It's just that it's very clumsy to save the
> information. Once I figure out how to store annotations in a more practical
> way, that problem will be solved (it might require a server).
>
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