{"id":9053,"date":"2020-08-04T09:42:15","date_gmt":"2020-08-04T13:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9053"},"modified":"2020-08-04T09:42:15","modified_gmt":"2020-08-04T13:42:15","slug":"zettelkasten-goes-mainstream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9053","title":{"rendered":"Zettelkasten Goes Mainstream"},"content":{"rendered":"

Until March of this year<\/a>, I had never heard the term \u201cZettelkasten\u201d or anything about the concept to which it applies. I first came across the idea in a post by Tiago Forte<\/a>, which pointed me to S\u00f6nke Ahrens\u2019 book, How to Take Smart Notes<\/a>. I read the book and thought that it was a very powerful scheme that I could probably use in my workflow.<\/p>\n

At the time, I felt like a pioneer. As far as I could tell, hardly anyone knew about the idea and virtually no one was writing about it. That\u2019s all changed. Six months later, the idea is popping up everywhere and almost everyone concerned with personal information management is writing about it.<\/p>\n

Over at Fast Company<\/a> there\u2019s an excellent article by Jack Beaudoin\u2014Zapier on Zettelkastens and how to implement them<\/a>. The article considers using existing applications, such as Evernote<\/a>, OneNote<\/a>, or Notion<\/a> but concludes that these aren\u2019t ideal solutions. In the first place, they fail to implement important Zettelkasten concepts such as atomicity and backlinks. Perhaps more importantly, they\u2019re proprietary and offer no guarantees that they\u2019ll be there for you tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Another possibility is bespoke applications written specifically to implement the Zettelkasten idea. The premier example of this, of course, is Roam<\/a>, which I\u2019ve mentioned before. It\u2019s a really excellent implementation of the Zettelkasten idea but, sadly, also suffers from its proprietary nature. The database is held on their servers so longevity is a real concern.<\/p>\n

Finally, there are the solutions that use standard tools and the OS filesystem. These certainly speak to the proprietary and longevity issues but may not offer a good Zettelkasten implementation. They mention Obsidian<\/a> but most of the ideas in this category aren\u2019t really worthwhile. What they don\u2019t mention, of course, are all the solutions available to Emacs users. That\u2019s reasonable for media like Fast Company that aren\u2019t addressed to geeks or the open source community. But if you are<\/i> an Emacs user, you have your choice of the several solutions that have been discussed on Irreal recently. I continue to believe that Org-roam is the standout in this cohort but I still haven\u2019t had a chance to experiment with it; I\u2019m stuck struggling with mu4e<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Until March of this year, I had never heard the term \u201cZettelkasten\u201d or anything about the concept to which it applies. I first came across the idea in a post by Tiago Forte, which pointed me to S\u00f6nke Ahrens\u2019 book, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18,207],"class_list":["post-9053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs","tag-zettelkasten"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9053"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9054,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9053\/revisions\/9054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}