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by jsteinbach 1981 days ago
For VSC there is also Dendron [1], which I found nicer than Foam.

After lots of trial/error and at the end of the rabbit hole I found Emacs with org-roam [2].

It has a steep learning-curve and often seems outdated, but it is also very powerful, has VIM hotkeys, and allows me to create the academic workflow I want - so far I can automatically create a note from my Zotero .bib library, fill it based on a template and the insert all my annotations from the associated PDF. Afterwards I also semi-automatically extract the references from that PDF, insert them into the annotations and then start to link everything into my Zettelkasten system.

Sometimes I wish I just stayed with VSCode/Markdown, but then I remember that I can now put "elisp" on my resumee :)

Overall I think that the "new" note-taking/Zettelkasten-systems is very cool and useful, but I wish someone would come along and create "the next big thing" which in my opinion is multi-dimensional notes.

Tiddlywiki/Tiddlyroam [4,5], TheBrain[6] and even Scrivener [7] seem like a step in the right direction, but they also make some other things overly complicated (convoluted UI, no plug/play export, bad editors, ...).

I want to be able to freely take notes on my computer the same way I can do on paper, and then be able to "super-charge" them by linking, aggregating, searching them. At the moment notes are "one-dimensional", i.e. I can only write from top to bottom. Compare it to paper where I can freely change my style of writing, add drawing, annotations, change directions, ... Writing on the computer just feels very restricting.

1: https://dendron.so/ 2: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam 3: https://github.com/inukshuk/anystyle 4: https://tiddlywiki.com/ 5: https://tiddlyroam.org/ 6: https://www.thebrain.com/ 7: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

1 comments

Is Dendron on par with Foam for data visualization with related tags?

If it works the same way then is it a case of installing the extension with little config after that?

I'm not opposed to switching again

As far as I know both Dendron and Foam stitch together a bunch of plug/play VSC extensions, so it should be interchangeable.

I liked Dendron more, as it seemed a more curated experience - the creator has a plan and is hard at work to make his "customers" happy.

"Dendron, the client, is free and will always remain free. It is also open source so anyone is free to make their own fork of Dendron.

That being said, I'm all in on Dendron and this is my full time gig. I want to make sure that developing Dendron remains sustainable. To that end, I plan on introducing value add server side functionality that folks may pay for."

PS: Why not switch to Emacs? It will only take a measly year to get comfortable! :)