I have been using rich text. I use a couple of keyboard shortcuts for basic formatting that I use for quotes from documents.
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That sounds great. But, I am slightly confused about how this works.
If I create a e.g. markdown document that is titled Mozilla Hubs. How do I automatically reference that from another document? If I use that phrase in a document, and use Create Link, it just creates another document with the same name. And, if I try to edit the link, it simply shows it as DEVONwiki. Clearly, I am missing something fundamental here.
Hi Andy,
In the Prefs, Editing there is an option for automatic wikilinks. And I have names and aliases selected. I hope that helps.
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@cj13 Thanks for sharing how you are creating a zettelkasten in DT. And agree with @miguelalfayateâs comment as to ow Roam is a new software and I do not exactly like their âstore-every-thing-onlineâ approach and the somewhat proprietary node-links etc.
What I do like about roam a lot is that I can have one running document for the whole day and be attaching tags to the text such that later I can filter on those tags and have a page created with those filtered results.
So question for you, given you have rather large zettelkasten - do you always find the right note and take your notes there or do you use a free formatted page for the day (I suspect not the latter).
I wonder if you can share your approach. That would be so helpful and it seems to others as well.
Thank you!
I donât know of Roam. I have a diverse set of interests and am interested in what you might call âdot joiningâ. What DT does well is if I drop a quote I like into a note and it has the name of one of my other notes, it links to it.
The search facility of DT works really well for me. I can now find things in seconds when in the past Iâd spend much longer searching disks, folders, trying to guess what I had labelled it etc. I use DT to link to folders, collections of âstuffâ I have so I can get to them quickly.
I Came to DT via Notebook (now extinct- that was painful) and Curio which I still use a bit - I have a pile of stuff filed in there. I can link to it from DT. Linking in Curio not as good as Notebook was but it was better than nothing until I stumbled upon a book on note taking that gestured to the notion of a zettelkasten: Ahrens, S. (2017). How to take smart notes: one simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking. Hamburg, Germany: SoĚnke Ahrens.
I had been playing with DT and was unaware of the wikilink feature.
Not sure this answers what you are after. It was Steven Johnsonâs book Where Good Ideas Come From, that nudged me to look at DT a really long time ago.
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I forgot to add. I have a most limited understanding of all the bibs and bobs that DT offers so my practices probably could be improved a good deal. But I do like the simplicity of how this works for me.
I prefer Markdown but I dislike the way DT displays Markdown documents. Lately Iâve been doing RTF more and it seems fine.
Common wisdom among many people is that Markdown is more futureproof because itâs based on plain text. Iâm skeptical whether common wisdom is right here. RTF is used by just about every desktop word processor, and it was developed in 1987.
RTF is not mobile-native and Apple doesnât consider it a first-class citizen for iOS. For many people thatâs a major drawback.
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Me as well possibly. I may need to look into this further.
As long as DevonThink and other apps support RTF on the iPad and iPhone, that may be good enough for me.
The problem with futureproofing is that youâre usually trading off capabilities today.
Just my 5 cents:
I used to use RTF/RTFD for all my notes for the last few years. I kind of messed up by switching to slightly different formatting once a year (font face, font size, and ways to emphasis keywords, important sentences, highlights, etc). I found myself increasingly uncomfortable to reviewing notes that are with different looks.
Thatâs why I switch to markdown for note-taking since the last few months and I am loving it.
The pros: (1) I now am certain that I will have a consistent look and feel for all my notes in the future, and I can change the format of all my notes at once by switching to a different stylesheet. (2) From a programming aspect, it seems to me that it is easier to manipulate markdown files in batch mode (add some info/heading or extract links from the content, etc). (2) I believe that it is easier for other apps to import/use markdown files for further processing. (3) If the transclusion feature of MMD6 (Thoughts on migrating from Ulysses) is implemented in DT3 in the future, I think we will be able to snap/link multiple notes in DT3 in a manner that is as smooth as Scrivener or Roam Research.
The cons: (1) The markdown file still canât handle image attachment as a package. The images in a markdown note are stored in a separate folder, and the way those assets folders are managed is not consistent. Disclaimer: I am not an expert in markdown so I may be making a wrong statement. (2) It takes some time for me to cognitively filter-out all those formatting characters while reading the notes in raw-mode and I had to switch back-and-forth between the raw and preview mode for a while. However, I only use DTâs internal editor. Some users prefer using external WYSIWYG markdown editor for a unified interface.
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@cj13 âdot joiningâ is indeed the desired state. will try to get to the books that you have mentioned. thank you for sharing.
@cj13 - a specific question on your process for you - say you reading a few articles one after the other, or a book, and you have ideas that pertain to different zettels in your system. do you go to each individual such note and type your thoughts, or do you write in a note related to that book or a note for that day, and tag the zettel in that line or paragraph. And thanks again for taking the time.
@ngan - Transclusion is the word that describes what I am loving about Roam. Didnât know that there was a word for it already! So that way one can avoid having to open a separate document every time.
Would be so great if DT could create a (virtual or periodically generated) page for tags (via transclusion) with tagged
- text from files (where such text can be suitably extracted) and
- links (to other files / folders where such extraction is not possible).
It seems @BLUEFROG considered this feature here - Thoughts on migrating from Ulysses.
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I learnt the word from @Bernardo_V! 
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What was your solution? Did you just get used to seeing the formatting characters, or did you find a workaround?
I donât want DTâs Markdown editor to be WYSIWIG because that defeats one of the main purposes of Markdown.
However, every Markdown editor Iâve seen EXCEPT for DT offers some light formatting in the editor itself. Text wrapped with double-asterisks is a bit darker, blockquotes are indented, headers are bigger and darker, etc.
This is one of my top two or three feature requests for DevonThink.
I guess I could get used to working with the preview window side-by-side with the editing window. However, that gets cluttered if I also have OTHER windows open on my desktop.
P.S. It just occurred to me that Iâm wrong about DT being the only markdown editor that doesnât provide some visual formatting. The Discourse editor also works the same way as DTâs. Somehow itâs not a big deal in Discourse.
P.P.S. Apologies if Iâve taken this thread off on a tangent â however, Iâll bring it back home a bit by noting that Ulysses is one of those Markdown editors that offers light formatting, and it does a great job of it. One of my favorite features is its proprietary syntax for embedding comments in a document; just surround the comment in ++double plus signs.++ I use a stylesheet that shows comment text in red. So I have little notes to myself throughout drafts: âcheck spelling of this guyâs name,â âwhat year did that happen?â etc.
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(1) Get used to ânot-seeingâ the formatting characters.
(2) The only experience I have is Typora which is a very nice and minimalist app. But I choose to stick with DTâs editor shortly after to avoid using too many apps.
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FYI you could use either DT3âs Markdown editor or double-click and open the same Markdown file in Typora. I use Typora more myself due to some issues with the DT3 editor such as rendering output as single line entries rather than a block of code.
rendering
output as single line entries rather than a block of code.
??
I filed a bug report, screenshot and examples and sent it over maybe two months ago. Itâs pretty easy to repro, just compare the output between DT3 view and any markdown editor app view.
Although I know about it, I donât use it as often as I should. Perhaps if it were included in DT3 I wouldâŚ
Connected Text, a windows wiki software, does something similar and you can even select the section you want to transclude. This makes it very very interesting. (Only problem is that it does not have auto wiki linkingâŚ)
and any markdown editor app view
If you are referring to not using two spaces at the end of paragraphs, that is not part of the Markdown or MultiMarkdown spec, so itâs an extension to Markdown therefore not a bug.
Staying within the boundaries of Markdown or MultiMarkdown is the best option if you will be using Markdown in DEVONthink.
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@mals I usually keep quotes and notes from a book of paper in the one note (current note). if there is a big connect I notice with another book or paper, I will sometimes dump that quote with notes into the current note. I donât use any tags. I date and time stamp each note, something, I think, Luhmann did with his slip box? As I said I am no DT expert and use a minimal set of its myriad features. I have a short working paper that details my history in all of this, a pdf: zettelkasten.pdf (184.8 KB)