Thanks for these insights! The point about the Zetteling not becoming tedious is somethink I need to keep in mind, also with regard to the technicalities involved.
For me it’s just the conclusion of taking my Zettelkasten to Obsidian or staying with it in DevonThink. And for the moment, I stay in DT. And this was one of the more important differences.
Also, yeah: don’t use automated WIKI links in your Zettelkasten. I agree.
+1 for this and I can’t wait! aha notion just did it too. back linking is the talk of the town! DT will become a beautiful companion for obsidian
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.
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 
I see that “See Also & Classify” Inspector Tab is not yet mentioned here. I use that feature to show the backlinks and unlinked references. There is no clear separator/difference between those two, and it is a bit hit-and-miss. For example, a markdown link with item link as destination x-devonthink-item:// often not recognized in this tab.
But in my usage, that feature is good enough.
(That makes me laugh, every time)
Please explain. Not easy to think of “See Also & Classify”, but once I found it, it looked good. However, it is not listing files that are linking back, I thought, but files with text what DevonThink makes out to be related for whatever reason.
So how do you explicitly get back links to show?
like I said, in my usage the “See Also & Classify” is good enough and kinda hit and miss.
for example, this is a note I take from article I captured (trying to implement Zettelkasten):
Then if I open the captured article, it shows this:
Where in 1b1 and 1b2 I mentioned the article with wiki link [[Goodbye, Clean Code]].
But in few other notes that mentions other note/captured article/book, it didn’t show the relation in the “See Also & Classify”. Thus, I say hit and miss, but good enough.
I also would like to add my +1 to this feature request. It would be wonderful to have. Fun fact: In my DT2 days, I tried to implement a digital Zettelkasten that would take advantage of modern features and in the end opted to use ikiwiki instead of DT because of its Backlink feature.
My note system has evolved and moved around in the past years as have my requirements about what application to use as the shelter for my notes, but I would love to use DT for it and I’m not against having backlinks available at all (it’s one of the reasons why I consider using Obsidian atm).
Hmmmm. In my case it found the wiki links, but I’m not using them anymore. If the wiki links would just be translated to markdown, I’d use them all the time (for typing a wiki link is more easy with auto completion).
So my feature proposal would be: put WIKI links into markdown in markdown style.
Or other feature proposal: give me autocompletion for markdown style links for all file names in a certain group or groups.
"See Also & Classify” did not show any of the markdown links backlinking (is this correct or is something wrong over here or do I have to change some settings?). As written above, I’m not necessarily needing them for my Zettelkasten implementation. But when I take Zettels from a book I read, I always put the link to the source zettel (the bibliographic zettel for the book) at the end of my Zettels coming from that book. It would then be very nice to collect all the backlinks to the source zettel, because that then are all my Zettels from this particular book (which makes summaries easier).
That’s why I’m trying to rewrite the applescripts for adding backlings that one can find in this forum quite often in a way they just add backlinks to one particular note (my source zettel).
Someone might browse this message thread and conclude this feature didn’t exist yet — but the latest version does have backlinks (or more precisely, it shows both incoming and outgoing links).
Should’ve linked to the product blog instead: DEVONtechnologies | DEVONthink 3.6
Also, something that people who care about links care about:
For Markdown documents you’ll get a URL that links directly to a section.
Interesting. The incoming links feature has subtle features that help exploration, too.
If you open the document inspector and choose links, you see the backlinks. When you click on a backlink (incoming link), DT shows the backlinked document in the preview window without changing what the document inspector is showing.
You can breeze through the backlinked documents.
The only thing that isn’t clear to me is how to shift the document inspector to the currently viewed document. I can reveal the backlinked document in the navigation list, but the inspector doesn’t update - which is a good thing until you want to see the document properties in the backlinked document.
The way to update the inspector is to click on any button in the inspector pane, at which time the inspector displays information from the current document.
That’s easy enough, but there’s no way to confirm what document the inspector is currently reporting. It would be nice if the document path were always visible at the top of the inspector window, because if you click on the “i” button the inspector will jump to the currently selected document, not the one you were viewing backlinks for.
Another nice thing I hadn’t noticed is the way automatic wikilinks are handled. They aren’t part of the document, they are part of the rendition of the preview. If I mention a document name in Nisus, it doesn’t become a link in Nisus but it does appear as a link in DT’s preview. I think that’s a good thing because otherwise automatic links might clutter up my document. If I manually add a link in Nisus, it’s there in the preview, too.
Ohhhh.
That’s fantastic.
Finally, DT could be used instead of Roam or Obsidian and the likes…
