For some time, Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has been working on an Emacs note taking application that he calls Denote. The system is vaguely reminiscent of a Zettlekasten and has a bunch of nice features. It doesn’t depend on Org mode but integrates nicely with it. You can even set up a Denote capture buffer in Org mode.
As I say, the project has been on-going for some time so there’s lots of information and videos about it. The basic idea is that each note is given a unique name that includes a fine grained time stamp, a title, some optional tags, and an extension. That uniqueness and predictability make it easier to organize your notes.
The purpose of this post is to describe Prot’s latest video reporting on an extension to Denote’s dynamic blocks. The TL;DR is that Denote has a special type of note—called a Meta note—that is denoted by the meta tag. The idea of a Meta note is that it contains information about a collection of other notes. That may include, for example, a commentary or summary of the affiliated notes but it’s also possible to (automatically) include links to those notes. The latest changes, described in the video, provide a way of directly including all or part of the associated notes in the Meta file.
I haven’t paid too much attention to Denote until I saw this video. I felt that Org met my note taking needs and didn’t see a reason to adopt a separate application just for notes. After watching Prot’s video, I may give it a try. I like what he’s done with dynamic blocks. Take a look at the video for the details. It’s only 11 minutes, 46 seconds long so it should be easy to fit in. It may convince you to try out the Denote note taking system.