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Comment by vlark | Hacker News Reader

I can't recommend the Zettlekasten Method enough: https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/

You can do it with index cards or you can use software to practice the method and grow your note collection. I now prefer Zettlr (https://www.zettlr.com) after using Joplin (https://joplinapp.org), which are both FOSS.

One of the core strategies of the Zettlekasten Method is to link notes to each other. That's how knowledge grows: connections and synthesis (internalization/application of the connections)

Here's a 3-year-old video on the method that serves as a good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFZHuWLA09M

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I’ve been an Obsidian user for a couple of years and love it. Hitting CMD + u creates a unique note under my “Journal” folder with a filename derived from a datetime string. This keeps notes ordered chronologically and avoids having to name everything up front.

I make liberal use of tags and find that this basically works great - 50 to 100 tags seems to be all I could ever need for both personal and work stuff, which number is quite scalable. However, I had always intended to progressively adopt Zettlekasten, which does sort of seem like the gold standard.

Unfortunately, the way Obsidian works is that you can only really conveniently link to the filenames of other notes, rather than directly to a heading therein. That UX makes it a non-starter for Zettlekasten, for me.

Thought I’d leave this here in case it’s of use to anyone, and would be very interested to hear from anyone who’s landed on a good Zettlekasten setup in Obsidian.

Zettlr looks excellent, and since they both run on a plain folder of markdown files, I might even trial running both together for a bit.

Did you know you could type [[## in Obsidian and it will autocomplete all headings available in the current vault instead of just the current note with [[#?

It's barely mentioned and I don't even remember what post I saw this in on the Obsidian forum.

Yes I recall seeing that last time I looked into this. It doesn’t quite get you there on the UX, but I just went back and did some digging[1]: looks like the answer is - as is often the case with Obsidian - a plugin[2].

[1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/use-h1-or-yaml-property-title-in...

[2] https://github.com/snezhig/obsidian-front-matter-title

You can also link to a section/paragraph using (if I remember correctly) [[#^

Guess I'll toot my horn slightly: I made a Zettlekasten-ish tool for the CLI a few years ago and have used it for my work notes (including daily TODO), project logs, and personal diary stuff ever since. At this point I've got a hierarchy of 114 notes, with some notes linked into multiple locations in the tree. The hardest part is trying to decide if you want a new note for a topic, or if it should fit into an existing one.

Maybe somebody might find it useful:

https://github.com/floren/zk

Everything is just files in a directory, so I use Syncthing to have access to it everywhere.

It's also got a thing that lets you associate files with a given note, but the tooling around that isn't very good yet. I've been slowly working on a client for the Acme text editor, and I've also wanted to make a proper Go GUI client.

(man I need to re-do the CLI with some library that does built-in help, because some commands like `zk orphans` [which finds notes that have no parents] aren't documented anywhere)

+1. I found that most of the content about Zettelkasten made it look more complex than it needs to be.

I wrote a piece about it: https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-05-01-zettelkasten-method/

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