Custom sidebar content

[danymat]

Hello, I have a Zettelkasten made with about 500 notes (https://notes.danielmathiot.tech), and I see a lot of value in this new application called ema. (I like the ability to have an index of tags in @tags).

Small detail, but that stops me to change from neuron to emanote, is the unusability of the @Index left component, because all my notes are in the same directory.

What I would love is the possibility to change what I want to show in this left component. I have some ideas for customization:

• tags (specific tags, or all tags).
• Only specific notes

In the use of tags, I use a standardization that is : a tag is #tag, and for the note that explain the tag (what the Zettelkasten forum call structure notes), I use ##tag. My personal use case would be to show in the left component, all tags, or only ##tags.

Feel free to discuss about this idea,
Sincerely, Daniel

[srid]

@danymat I like the idea of displaying a tag index (even if only a subset) in the sidebar, instead of folder hierarchy. Tags however don't have a descriptive title, like notes do. Take a look at https://www.srid.ca/@tags ... for a tag like #blog/neuron, what would you expect to be displayed (as link title) in the sidebar?

Also I don't understand the ##tag notion; how is that different from using hierarchical tags (eg; #structures/tag or #tag/structure), aside from the latter not introducing new syntax? EDIT: In any case, emanote can take a tag query and use that to filter the tag index; the query tag:#** will pull all tags beginning with a hash (not counting the first # itself).

EDIT: Also if you haven't seen, checkout #50 - which talks about expanding /@tags (and /@index) with sub-index'es.

/cc @bradleyharden who had some thoughts on the graph aspect of emanote in Matrix chat.

[danymat]

Okay, I tried the newest emanote version:
You can try it with my notes at https://github.com/danymat/Brain

I'm wondering:

• How to use tags index by default instead of notes index in left sidebar
• How can I sort tags in the tags index by most appearance

[srid]

How to use tags index by default instead of notes index in left sidebar

It's not implemented yet. Still thinking about it. Note that you can also try the WIP neuron layout (at the moment it simply removes the sidebar and widens the container, but it should get something like the uplink tree soon): https://github.com/Kuratoro/woke.zettel.page/blob/159f550168d13ff5899e6b0d6ab2224dd5eb22da/index.yaml#L5-L6

How can I sort tags in the tags index by most appearance

By "most appearance" do you mean "note count"? Tag Index sorts them by name, at the moment.

[danymat]

By "most appearance" do you mean "note count"? Tag Index sorts them by name, at the moment.

Yes exactly, by note count !

[dpaetzel]

A third candidate to display is the folgezettel tree in the sidebar (after merging with directory hierarchy): https://notes.danielmathiot.tech/impulse

Is the neuron impulse view already supported by emanote? I can't find it …

[srid]

@dpaetzel Not right now, but that's a conversation to have in the context of #50

[bradleyharden]

@srid, thanks for tagging. I'm not sure I have anything to add though.

I've been thinking about these features from a geometric point of view. I might take the opportunity to brain dump a little bit, in case it inspires anyone else to come up with some good ideas.

• Each note is a node in a graph
• You can link notes to create the graph structure
• Folgezettel links are essentially a filter applied to the links. It lets you keep the "important" links as "structural" links, and it declutters the Up Tree.
• Tags are essentially subsets of nodes within the graph.
• Hierarchical tags form a tree structure
  • There are many root tags, forming many independent trees
  • The directory tree could be expressed exactly the same as any other tag tree.
    • Would it make sense to do so? We could probably reserve a special tag name for it.
• Each tag could have its own note to explain it.
  • I don't think this is currently possible, right?
  • If that were possible, you could express tags as a link between the tag's note and each tagged item.
  • However, that might not be the cleanest representation, because it doesn't guarantee that sub-tags contain a strict subset of the tagged items.
• Tags are a way to categorize your notes, forming subsets. Links are a way to form associations between notes in an unstructured way.
  • In Matrix chat, I was discussing the idea of categorizing links, since we already do so for Folgezettel links.
  • So far, I still can't come up with a strong use case for link categories except the existing one, namely filtering your links to "important" ones.

I don't think there's anything new here, but I found it helpful to write it all down. Maybe someone else will as well.

[srid]

@danymat Try the new "note" layout, which now includes Neuron-like uplink tree:

https://note.ema.srid.ca/demo/neuron-layout

[srid]

The macOS app Bear displays hierarchical tags in the sidebar: https://blog.bear.app/2017/08/bear-tips-organize-notes-with-tags-and-infinite-nested-tags/

(Incidentally, Bear-exported Markdown notes work very well in Emanote; but it would be perfect if we supported tag sidebar)

[srid]

In the Bear view, clicking on a tag expands to a listing of notes tagged as that. Bear has 3-panes, unlike 2-panes of Emanote.

[srid]

I'm beginning to brainstorm over this. If anybody is interested, join the discussion over at Zulip.