Irreal

The other day I was checking Ali Abdaal’s You Tube feed for new videos and I happened to see an older video that I’d watched earlier. It was about how Abdaal uses Notion as a resonance calendar. When I first watched it, I thought it was interesting but it was before I had started reading Sönke Ahrens’ book on the idea of a Zettelkasten. What Abdaal is talking about is exactly that: implementing a Zettelkasten with Notion, although he doesn’t use that term.

As I’ve mentioned before, Notion is a nice app but prudent users will avoid it because you lose control of your data. The better solution is to use Org mode, which provides essentially the same functionality albeit without the fancy GUI.

If you’re an Org user and watch Abdaal’s video, you will be struck with how easily the things he’s doing translates almost directly into Org mode. I’ve looked a bit into Org-roam and it appears to ease the linking of ideas—although this can be handled manually in vanilla Org—so, once again, you can implement Abdaal’s procedures in Org and maintain control of your data.

The video is very useful because it mainly discusses how to take an idea and link it to other related ideas based on context. That’s the very essence of the Zettelkasten method and something that much of the literature glosses over. At least for me, seeing examples of how an idea is added and linked to others is very helpful in understanding the Zettelkasten method.

The video is 13 and a half minutes so it’s easy to watch and definitely worth your time if you’re interested in the Zettelkasten method.

In a perfect example of the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon, a month ago I had never heard of the the term Zettelkasten and now it seems to be everywhere I look. Previously, I wrote about the idea and noted that it was a perfect application for Org Mode. I’ve been experimenting with the concept a bit and using Org Mode to store and search for the data. It’s just preliminary futzing about. When I get around to using a Zettelkasten for real, I’ll probably use Jethro Kuan’s org-mode package, at least as a starting point.

In the mean time, Dan Pittman has his own Org Mode based Zettelkasten implementation. Like mine, it’s fairly elementary. He has a Bash script that captures the note title and pops him into Emacs to fill in the initial data. Like me, he uses Org agenda to search his notes by either tags or keywords. Other than the Bash script—which you could easily do without—there’s no special code: it’s just standard Org Mode. Pitmann keeps each “card” in a separate file with the the note’s date/time in the file name. That way, he can use the file name as the card ID. That’s a better strategy than what I do (using an org-id-get-create generated :ID: in a property drawer) because it’s much easier to link ideas.

I really like the Zettelkasten idea and have been collecting posts about ways to implement one. If you’d like to try it out too, Pittman’s post shows you how to get started in an easy way with a small investment in time.

Back in 2018, I wrote about a post by Daniel Gomez that describes how to use Org-mode for writing a thesis. At the time, Gomez was in the process of writing his own thesis and his post details his work flow and files structure. It’s an excellent how-to for anyone wanting to use Org for writing their own dissertation and well worth your time if you’re looking for a good thesis writing tool.

An the end of the post, Gomez says that he was considering building a thesis template repository to go with his post but that it would have to wait until after he’s finished his thesis. Now that he’s finished his PhD, Gomez has in fact published his templates as a GitHub repository.

It’s a valuable resource for anyone embarking on the writing of a dissertation, especially if, like Gomez, the thesis consists of three or four research chapters that are published separately as journal articles. With his setup, the exact same source is used for publishing the chapters as journal articles and as part of the thesis. Check out his post or the repository to see how he did this.

As I said in my original post, Org-mode really is a general purpose writing tool that can be used for memos, blog posts, reports, books, and even things like theses with their strict formatting rules. I do all my writing—except emails and texts—with Org and can’t imagine a better tool.

If you’ve been following Irreal for a while, you know that I periodically try to get Org Protocol integrated into my workflow and end up writing a post on how I failed yet again. The last such post was just a month ago. Now Mike Zamansky has shamed me with the latest video in his Using Emacs Series. The latest video describes how he got Org Protocol to capture links to Web pages and emails.

Org Protocol helps with the link between your browser or email client and Org Mode. Most of the actual work flow is implemented with Org capture templates in the usual way. Zamansky found a browser extension, org-capture-extension, that makes setting up the browser/org protocol link easy. It provides a button that will send the necessary information to Org Protocol so that the Org capture mechanism can deal with it.

Setting up Org Protocol can be very fussy so it’s nice to have Zamansky’s step-by-step video as a guide. The Org-Capture extension is not available for Safari so I can’t use his solution directly. Fortunately, I handle the browser/Org interface with the bit of Apple Script that I wrote about back in 2014.

If you’re running under Linux and want to capture links from your browser or, say, Gmail, be sure to take a look at this video to see how to set things up. If you’re running under Windows, Sacha has some wisdom on setting things up (it’s from 2015 but can probably still be made to work).

The video is 11 minutes 40 seconds long so it should be easy to find time for it.