One file Zettelkasten

alkhan

Seeing @sfast 's concept of the one file Zettelkasten in another post, I decided to try it out.

I don't know if he's elaborated on this already, but my hunch is that "if you can do it in a single file, then it means that you (more or less) understand the principles."

Would this be considered a good example of the one-file Zettelkasten?

Anyway, looking forward to the online course!

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Seeing that these notes don't have tags makes me wonder:
How crucial is tagging if you do link to notes heavily? Do you think a lack of tags would somehow hinder your knowledge work? I suspect that it's not that crucial, but may be useful for finding unexpected connections — and lastly, that I might be wrong. What are your thoughts?

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P.S. Dipping bread into coffee or hot chocolate makes it really delicious

Sascha

Looks good to me so far. A real Zettelkasten would've more direct links between the notes.

I use tags less and less the bigger my Zettelkasten is which is quite natural if you consider that tags become bloated after a while, too. However, you can use them in many different ways and they are, though not crucial, still useful.

zk_1000

i like the natural navigation in your Zettelkasten. For bigger topics you scroll up, for more details you scroll down¹. In case you want to use tags you could search for #Bread.

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1. directions up and down are relative to the document, not the display. ↩︎

alkhan

@Sascha said:
Looks good to me so far. A real Zettelkasten would've more direct links between the notes.

I use tags less and less the bigger my Zettelkasten is which is quite natural if you consider that tags become bloated after a while, too. However, you can use them in many different ways and they are, though not crucial, still useful.

Coming from you, that was reassuring What are some examples of such applications? I can only think of following a trail → using a tag to find indirect relationships (such as what you showed in one of your videos — can't remember exactly)

@zk_1000 said:
i like the natural navigation in your Zettelkasten. For bigger topics you scroll up, for more details you scroll down[^1]. In case you want to use tags you could search for #Bread.

[^1]: directions up and down are relative to the document, not the display.

Oh, that's not my actual Zettelkasten; it's just a test of Sascha's concept that I did for fun. But the placement wasn't intentional — not that the placement matters, anyway. It could very well be scattered and still work the same way.

zhanzh3ng

Am I the only one doing it old school with index cards and two card boxes?? Ironic perhaps given that I almost exclusively eat, sleep and breathe tech.

zk_1000

@alcantal intentional or not, using Alt+Home to jump to Main Structure Note or Luhmann's indexes or something alike is intuitive. Doesn't work anymore if you have multiple main structure notes.

Sascha

@alcantal Another use case would be narrowing down the search to the instances a word is used as a concept and not merely mentioned.