Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

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Oh boy, my system is old, didn't say it's good... I'm not retaining ephemeral notes, no work logs or anything like that. That's on separate "systems", often text files within the projects or actual paper. This makes things a lot easier.

Notational Velocity is mostly search based. I mean, it's a list of messages, a text editing field and a searchbar, nothing more. So system-wide shortcut to pop it up, Cmd-L to search and there you go. I'm mostly doing a bit of "SEO", so intentionally write content in the node that makes it easier to find. Tried tags, but that just added another layer and "Here's another good Bash Shell tip for Linux Servers:" makes it both more readable and provides hooks for searching.

Synchronisation has change a few times, it's just text files after all.

I'm trying to check whether the Zettelkasten method would help me, so I've currently switched to Obsidian and might try some others. They're still writing text files, so I can backport them easily when/if I'm done with it. Right now, I'm not sure whether just having a GUID/timestamp is enough even within NV. Sure, I can't just click on it, but that means that I just have to Cmd-C/Cmd-L/Cmd-V after it.

And being quite fond of Emacs, I try and fail with Org-Mode once a year.

Great, thanks for sharing some details about your setup. I do something similar with my email messages. I never delete anything. Should I later need to recall a conversation I use Mail.app's full text search. Success varies depending on how much context I can recall.

With the app I tried to provide additional access points into the data. Page links are an additional way if you use them like "@ mentions". Let's say you have a person or topic that a note is related to (for an email this would be the sender). I created a folder "Contacts" and added a note for each person. Now if I write something down I mention the page for that person on the note. Later on I can go to that person's page and see all notes connected to that person (the power of backlinks) or simply search for "@james", for example.

Zettelkasten: I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one. What is great about it is that Niklas Luhmann figured out a way to have page links and backlinks between notes in a setup in the physical world on actual paper. With digital notes, I think GUIDs and timestamps to identify notes are not necessary anymore, because the file path (or URL if you will) uniquely identifies a note.

Org mode: yes, same here with the added difficulty that I have a vi background :)

Well, the problem with using file names/URLs for unique identifiers is that they might change. So either you don't do that or you need some piece of software to update this. With a note title (and thus file name) of "[2020091149] Conversation about Note Taking on HN", I can just reference the part within brackets, and it also gives me the timestamp if the file metadata ever gets lost in sync.

But yeah, I don't have that many cross references now, this is one part where I'm looking for better solutions that don't depend on too much technology. Thus my Zettelkasten research. Probably will implement a lot of this with scripts and shortcuts (I'm quite fond of tools like Textexpander/atext for this).

Yes, I thought about both scenarios and actually added support for both to my app.

If you rename a note through the app it will go though all other notes and update them to use the new name.

The app also adds datestamps, YYYY-DD-MM, to the file name of each note exactly for the reason you mentioned. File metadata might get lost when copying a file around. The added benefit is that if you sort files alphabetically in Finder, they show up in the order you created them.

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