On Wednesday, January 29, 2020 at 10:45:58 PM UTC-5, andyjim wrote: > > Many thanks to all. I've only just now got back to this thread and > gratified to see tips have kept coming in. It will take me awhile to check > all these out but it looks good indeed. > > I also want to put in a plug here if I may, for someone to undertake a > robust Zettelkasten plugin for Leo. I think Zettelkasten is the best > available idea for notes, and I think Leo may be capable of implementing it > better than anyone else has done (disclaimer: this is the relatively > uninformed opinion of a Leo newbie and a non-programmer as well). It seems > to me (again as a complete newbie) that Leo already utilizes some (maybe > all?) of the core principles of Zettelkasten, and more besides, that would > only enhance the concept. It could truly be a marvelous piece of > software. Wish I knew python. >
I put a lot of time some years ago looking into how to get the most out of my browser bookmarks, and I arrived at some of the same principles as I now read about for a Zettelkaste. And I tackled some of the things that seem to be glossed over in the material I've seen on Zettelkastens. You can read a paper about the work here - http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2003/Passin01/EML2003Passin01.html The user interface is much better now, but the underlying system is the same. Briefly, with a typical browser, you can save bookmarks in (virtual) folders. But the only information you can store are 1) the title of the page, and 2) the folder name that you create. Not much to go on. I wanted to get the most possible out of it. Some of the difficulties come from the size of a large collection (I have more than 20,000 bookmarks). You can't remember most of it, and you can't remember the folder names where you put things. Over time, you may get duplicates, and you will probably invent new folder names even though they may do the same job as the older ones. And you will probably end up with the same bookmark in several folders. How do you find things, and how do you find related pages? Oh, and the system needs to be very simple to use or it won't be used. Do these issues sound familiar? Well, my system is limited to bookmarks, and it has some limitations to work around the fact that you can't store data to the file system from a browser. OTOH, it doesn't need to use a database, and it runs in the browser. Why I'm bringing this up here is that from time to time I toy with ideas for generalizing it to go beyond bookmarks (you can already annotate bookmarks with the system, which is much like linking notes to web pages - trouble is, it's very clumsy at present). I could see implementing some variation in Leo. The real difficulty in coming up with a system like this is in making it work at a large scale; that and a good interface. With a Zettelkasten, you want to link a note to other related ones. But how do you find those other related notes? How do you work with tens of thousands or more of notes and find what you want? How can you design a user interface that will be clear, simple, and usable at that scale? How do you deal with many-to-many relationships between notes? How can you promote serenditious discovery? Those are really hard issues. @andyjim, would you be interested in exploring this area further? -- 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/9f48d14e-63ec-4c4d-aacc-af5cfe766333%40googlegroups.com.
