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by marvinblum 2205 days ago
We went for search with Emvi [1]. There are people who like hierarchy, but I think if you don't know what you're looking for you won't find it in a structure anyway. Except everyone on the team or you personally put a lot of thought into it. A hierarchy does not scale well. We tried to make the search as powerful as possible. With filters that can be combined to filter the result set, but I mostly use the textsearch as it is good enough.

Im still thinking about how we could add "explorability". Sometimes you just want to click around a bit and explore what's there without any real goal in mind. Let me know if you have an idea on how the system could support that.

We are rebuilding the UI right now to put an even stronger focus on search. You can read about it here [2] if you like.

[1] https://emvi.com/

[2] https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-user-interface-QMZg...
2 comments
slightwinder 2205 days ago
> A hierarchy does not scale well. We tried to make the search as powerful as possible. With filters that can be combined to filter the result set, but I mostly use the textsearch as it is good enough.

Does it support dynamic hierachies? A Hierachy where each level is the result of a search/filter on the parent-level?

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marvinblum 2205 days ago
Hm I haven't heard of this term before but it sounds like it. The filters are additive, which means you reduce the result further by adding more filters. You can for example filter for a tag, add a group to filter for authors and then search through the remaining articles by text search.

I haven't found this feature to be that useful all the time, depending on the amount of articles you have. This is why it won't be in the new UI on day one (but will be re-implemented later, the backend is still there). You can find almost anything by using a few keywords, which is how I navigate Emvi right now.

[Edit] We have the plan to add configurable dashboard filters, which use the filters to show a subset of all articles, tags, members, groups and lists you like. I guess that's closer to what you described.

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NotUsingLinux 2205 days ago
Ha they even have zettekasten material in their demo Video. Although the tool nothing looks not much helping with it nor mentioning it in the text...
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marvinblum 2205 days ago
Well it's not primarily build to be a Zettelkasten. But you can use it like a Zettelkasten if you really want to, like with most writing tools. We have a few users which do that already. I wrote about it here: https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...
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