[ricg]

Great, thanks for sharing some details about your setup. I do something similar with my email messages. I never delete anything. Should I later need to recall a conversation I use Mail.app's full text search. Success varies depending on how much context I can recall.

With the app I tried to provide additional access points into the data. Page links are an additional way if you use them like "@ mentions". Let's say you have a person or topic that a note is related to (for an email this would be the sender). I created a folder "Contacts" and added a note for each person. Now if I write something down I mention the page for that person on the note. Later on I can go to that person's page and see all notes connected to that person (the power of backlinks) or simply search for "@james", for example.

Zettelkasten: I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one. What is great about it is that Niklas Luhmann figured out a way to have page links and backlinks between notes in a setup in the physical world on actual paper. With digital notes, I think GUIDs and timestamps to identify notes are not necessary anymore, because the file path (or URL if you will) uniquely identifies a note.

Org mode: yes, same here with the added difficulty that I have a vi background :)

[mhd]

Well, the problem with using file names/URLs for unique identifiers is that they might change. So either you don't do that or you need some piece of software to update this. With a note title (and thus file name) of "[2020091149] Conversation about Note Taking on HN", I can just reference the part within brackets, and it also gives me the timestamp if the file metadata ever gets lost in sync.

But yeah, I don't have that many cross references now, this is one part where I'm looking for better solutions that don't depend on too much technology. Thus my Zettelkasten research. Probably will implement a lot of this with scripts and shortcuts (I'm quite fond of tools like Textexpander/atext for this).

[ricg]

Yes, I thought about both scenarios and actually added support for both to my app.

If you rename a note through the app it will go though all other notes and update them to use the new name.

The app also adds datestamps, YYYY-DD-MM, to the file name of each note exactly for the reason you mentioned. File metadata might get lost when copying a file around. The added benefit is that if you sort files alphabetically in Finder, they show up in the order you created them.