ConnectedText on wine / mac and zettelkasten programs

Posted by nblaz
Jun 25, 2018 at 07:10 PM

Browza wrote:

>
>Also, a bit more generally: what are your thoughts on using digital
>zettelkästen? For one, it is not entirely clear to me whether
>ConnectedText will be developed in the next few years. But equally, I
>feel like I should be cautious about all programs when we are talking
>about a timespan of 20-30 years.
> >Thanks for helping out.

I’m a regular reader of this forum and decided to weigh in on this as my first post (hi everyone!) because you mentioned zettelkasten specifically. I’ve been on a long journey of establishing a interconnected, long term notes, having tried everything from dedicated artisanal tools like ConnectedText and Tinderbox, to wiki software like DokuWiki, TrunkNotes, TiddlyWiki, cloud notes apps like Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep, Notion, etc.

It seems that we CRIMPers are always looking for the tool that has the magic combination of functionality and data portability: no one wants to input a large body of data and then be held hostage by a developer, company, or even format, that is no longer active. At the same time, this is 2018 - we should be able to perform advanced, elegant operations with our data that helps us to move beyond what would have been possible even 5 or 10 years ago, right?

The conclusion I’ve come to is that, at least for myself, there is a tension between feature-rich tools and note longevity. This tension becomes a serious concern over a span of time as long as you’ve mentioned, 20-30 years. Because I’m erring towards note longevity on this kind of scale myself, I’m willing to sacrifice features, and believe that a plain-text methodology such as the one that Christian Tietze and Sascha Fast have published at zettelkasten.de fits the bill. I didn’t want to go this way initially, and found Manfred Kuehn’s pushback on the methodology quite persuasive in favor of a tool like ConnectedText. Ultimately, though, I found plaintext to be the easiest way to maintain a digital zettelkasten across Windows, Mac, and iOS, especially now that ConnectedText seems to no longer be under active development.

Hope this helps.