I’d say, tongue in cheek, that N. Luhmann’s brain was his “automatic backlinking device” ! Yes, I totally agree that the personal involvement with one’s ZK is what makes it a wonderful thinking tool.
Backlinks are useful for me when I’m on a particular note, especially an atomic one, and I’m wondering “do I have already mentioned or referenced it somewhere ?” The answer is not necessarily evident, because I’m still in the process of organising some 2’000 notes/ideas I had written in nvALT over the years. I have never had the “guts” nor the patience to do it with DEVONthink. It’s a Joy to do it with Obsidian ! It’s handling of links, mainly internal ones is brilliant ! (For those who think it could be easily done in DEVONthink : please take into account that I’m writing in French and that accented letters make things more complicated regarding links, especially “automatic” ones. It seems to never work like you’d like them to. In some softwares, you can’t even double click a word like “Hélène”, because it breaks at the accented letters ! Yes, even in 2020 !) The pipe syntax [[filename|displayed text]] renders things more practical and enjoyable. I wish DEVONthink and other softwares would adopt it. Isn’t it also in use on Wikipedia ? So, I guess, one could consider it a de facto standard.
You can count me as a further user/fan of both DT and Obsidian. I’m writing notes and linking them mainly in Obsidian — for one thing, it’s Markdown editor is way more advanced than the “just functional” one in DT.
- I’ve got a DEVONthink database that indexes my Obsidian vault(s), it works perfectly.
- When it’s useful, I write — while in Obsidian — Markdown links to items inside my different DT databases — generally folders of reference material. It works perfectly, they are “clickable” in both DT and Obsidian.
Thus, I think I get the best of both worlds. Praise for Markdown files !
To conclude, count me +1 for a backlinks feature in DEVONthink, this wonderful software that I’ve been enjoying since version 1, so many years ago !
Cheers,
Olivier 