Nabokov writing novels on index cards

ctietze

Zettelkasten Paraphrenalia of yore shown in this talk:
https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/nabokov/

It's actually about writing long form texts with org-mode/Emacs, but the principles shown easily translate to Zettelkasten work since the outset is Nabokov writing on index cards

FernandoNobel

Looks interesting, I'll take a look at it when I have some free time!

But, I feel like watching this video might give me more reasons to go down the emacs rabbit hole and I want to stick with Vim for the sake of my productivity :^)

chrisaldrich

Nice find @christian. I've collected a fair amount on Nabokov's method and ought to write something a bit more comprehensive on it. Until then, a photo of him writing in a car which seems more entertaining than writing in bed:

@FernandoNobel If you're worried about the rabbit hole, stop at the 5 minute mark, but even the second half isn't so Emacs specific that it's likely to derail your Vim practice. (Most of the video is very high level structure and method oriented and not Emacs specific in my opinion, but he does provide a link to more Emacs specific details which you'll probably want to skip.)

FernandoNobel

@FernandoNobel If you're worried about the rabbit hole, stop at the 5 minute mark, but even the second half isn't so Emacs specific that it's likely to derail your Vim practice. (Most of the video is very high level structure and method oriented and not Emacs specific in my opinion, but he does provide a link to more Emacs specific details which you'll probably want to skip.)

Thank you for your advice :-)

I will watch everything, but I will activate my anti-emacs protocol from the 5 minute mark haha.

FernandoNobel

I have watched the video, and I agree that the proposed method could be easily adapted to Zettelkasten as a structure note.

But, what I find most interesting is that TaskPaper already implements much of the functionality shown to fold by sections and notes.

If we recontextualize the elements of TaskPaper (projects, tasks, notes and tags) using the following mapping:

Project -> Chapter
Task    -> Scene
Note    -> The actual prose
Tags    -> Comments

we can readily follow this method using just TaskPaper.

The only problem would be the indentation, which could be strange for prose writing.