More adventures in sandboxing[1][2] I've been working on a Zettelkasten app: https://archive.org/details/akkartik-teliva-2022-02-10 (video; 4 minutes) One interesting insight here was that putting raw file operations directly in

main

makes the app easy to audit. You can inspect just that one function and give just it permissions to perform file operations on your computer, while denying them to the rest of the app including callees of

main

. Anyways, I'd love to hear thoughts on this. I don't have experience with note-taking apps, and my UX skills suck. Let me know if you have suggestions, feature ideas, or if you'd like a private copy tailored for yourself. Situated software and all that. Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/teliva [1] https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C0120A3L30R/p1640501578098600 [2] https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CCL5VVBAN/p1644198434431509

That's an interesting demo application in that it is (1) well suited to text mode and (2) a nice use case for situated / personalizable software. As an implementation of Zettelkasten, however, it looks rather weird. The idea of the "box of index cards" is precisely not to impose any hierarchy on the notes. Instead, you have references to the cards' unique IDs (which are the titles in some implementations). A basic operation which needs good UI support is thus to look up a card while you are working on another one, for inserting a link.

Thanks! Yeah I haven't demoed that yet. As a teaser notice the little stripes of color above the menu at the bottom of the screen. It seems to me that the way you name IDs in Z is intended precisely to impose hierarchy. Zettel 1a1 is 'under' 1a in a way that is hard to undo after the fact. All you can do is insert more links in between, or let this side atrophy and copy the cards to 1b to try again. Cross-links are expensive in space, and you can't live with them alone. I'd love to be corrected on this score. I'm not actually a Z practitioner, and here I'm deliberately trying to build something for others rather than myself. I'm also curious if you consider Workflowy, Roam et al. reasonable implementations of Z, because to me they've always seemed internally consistent, but something different, more wiki-like.

There are many digital interpretations of the original Zettelkasten idea, so it's hard to pin down exactly what is an essential aspect of it. With index cards, the ID had to be structured to make finding the card as easy as possible. Any digital pointer does better than that. Which is why many digital versions (e.g. Roam, Org-Roam, TiddlyWiki, ...) just use the title as the ID. Hierarchies can then be achieved via transclusion, or lists-of-links, etc. But in my understanding of Zettelkasten, hierarchies are optional and certainly not a central feature of the method.