nvUltra
Hey, I've just stumbled upon this announcement by the nvALT2 (also Marked 2 etc.) guy Brett Terpstra: https://brettterpstra.com/2019/04/10/codename-nvultra/
Apparently he's teaming up with Fletcher Penney (the developer of Multi Markdown Composer) to revive the project. I don't know what the direction is they're taking, but basically having two parallel development forks I anticipate one of the projects possibly being outdone. Given how well the original nvALT was conceived, this might be bad news for TheArchive. Maybe you could bring your expertise into the mix? (I'm not affiliated with the project.)
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
It's not a Zero-Sum Game
I don't see how this could be bad news for The Archive. There are already a dozen other editors approximately in The Archive / nvALT space. I switch between them occasionally depending on what features I want. The things that make The Archive special (and, to address what I think is your implied danger, worth spending money on) are the features that are specific to ZK functionality like [[wiki linking]], automatic production of UIDs, etc. Brett does good work, and I am looking forward to seeing how this goes.
This.
In addition: We do a very different thing than them. The Archive currently has the basic features only. Therefore, they seem more similar than they actually are.
I am a Zettler
Tease
@ctietze, @Sascha:
What I like about nvUltra or however it's going to be called is that you can have your zettels in different folders. That's something I would like to have for TA as well. I don't want to use different folders for organising my knowledge (happy not to have the unnecessary problems with categorising things anymore), but sometimes I would like to share just a few notes with other people (e.g. recipes). If TA could handle different folders, I could just put them in a separate Dropbox-folder and then share it with other people. At the moment, I would either have to give people access to my whole Zettelkasten (which is not what I want) or duplicate them into a separate folder that I share – but then they are not affected if I make changes to the ones in my Zettelkasten...
I use Noodlesoft – Noodlesoft – Simply Useful Software to move some new/modified files in The Archive directory to a folder I share in Dropbox. I don't have to do anything.
When I modify or add a new file with certain words in the file name, they get copied to the shared folder and Dropbox syncs them instantly.
macosxguru
Interesting use case. We will discuss this topic. Thanks for sharing!
I am a Zettler
@macosxguru: Thanks for the tip, interesting! That would be my only use case for Hazel so far, so it's probably not worth buying it yet.
@Sascha: Thanks! Would be really nice if that was part of a future update.
@macosxguru @Vinho If you don't want to buy a comfortable app, there's always the built-in core tool called "Folder Actions Setup". (Look for the phrase in Spotlight. It's located in
/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications.)Edit: turns out you can right-click folders and then pick Services > Folder Action Setup...
https://www.blogsdna.com/25439/how-to-set-folder-actions-setup-for-folders-on-mac.htm
There, you can specify folders and scripts to run when the folder contents change. You can essentially wire your Zettelkasten note archive and your shared folders to call
rsyncfor two-way syncing of changes. I think this is a fun experiment, so if any of you embark on this, I'd like to suggest opening a new discussion and continue hacking and commenting thereAuthor at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@ctietze:
My current workaround for this is now to use the following Keyboard Maestro macro:
The file names of all the files supposed to go into the shared folder have the string "[RCP]" in them. The macro updates the shared folder whenever a file is added to or removed from my Zettelkasten. (Unfortunately not whenever one of the relevant files is changed, but I can live with that for the moment.)
What I'm not quite happy with: The macro goes through a lot of computational steps – it goes through all my zettels and looks for the [RCP]-string. It would be much more elegant, if a macro could be triggered by a file with that string being changed or added to my Zettelkasten, but I can't see how that would be possible at the moment...
I'm not sure how to fork or do zettelkasten-like link in this forum to a place where we discuss our "hacks", but what @Vinho is describing with both keyboard maestro and hazel is what I do. Here's a tweet thread where I give an example. My hazel rule is at the bottom. The logic of the thread is about folgezetteln (which I would love to continue to discuss but don't want to resurrect here!). You could easily replace places I am talking about folgezettel with "recipes" or "project x."
And this is a helpful link to figure out how to do something like that in hazel (i.e. look for specific tags or codes within the text file).
I'm just testing Hazel and wonder if it is fit for the purpose after all. I would like recipes that I delete in my Zettelkasten also to be deleted in the shared folder, but Hazel doesn't seem to be able to do that (neither does the KM macro posted above). How do others deal with this problem, e.g. @macosxguru?
I don't want the shared folder to be called "Zettelkasten", which would be required if I use the workaround described here.
I figured out a way to deal with it myself now: In addition the the Hazel rule that copies new recipe files in the ZK to the shared folder and syncs changes to already existing files, I created the following Keyboard Maestro macro that deletes a recipe-file in the shared folder when a file with the same name has been removed from my Zettelkasten:
Thought this would be easier, but at least it seems to work now!
That is a very elegant solution.
macosxguru