It’s a deep topic to discuss, and I would point you to the forums on www.zettelkasten.de (it’s in English). Some people like to ID their notes in a way that suggests a topic hierarchy, others don’t. Some people create arguments using structure notes with each point linking to an atomic note, others don’t.
To give a basic idea of what I am pointing at, if you think of outliners in a topically hierarchical way, then the practice of putting every thought into such a hierarchy will tend to “nudge” you to to think along the lines of such a hierarchy, which is potentially constraining. One of the claimed benefits of a ZK’s atomic notes and direct note-to-note links is that it can encourage mental connections between ideas across these types of hierarchies in a way that encourages intellectual creativity and new perspectives.
Of course, if you do not think of outliners as suggesting a topical hierarchy,but instead is just some sort of grouping method, then this wouldn’t be an issue for you. Unfortunately, I am unable to look at an outline in that way.
See this is why I hate the term “outliners”, because I feel you would be less inclined to say that if instead you replaced outline with bullet points in that sentence.
I feel that bullet points force you to stick to atomiticity more so than a blank page (especially in the early note-taking cycle/stages). Under the bullet-point conventation, you stick to one (or at least one main) idea to each bullet point. For a lot of people, taking literature/fleeting notes (e.g. using pen and paper) is usually already done using bullet points in a natural way anyway. And when, and should, you need to add heirarchy (which will eventually occur at some point no matter how hard you try) you can introduce nested bullet points — without worrying about formatting and conventions etc.
I suppose it comes down to what works for the individual as I can see advantages and disadvantages to both sides. On a side note, I can forsee note-taking apps/philosophies becoming the religions of the future
What would be amazing is if it were possible to include a dynamic block that was parsed as a separate instance of org – an org-buffer block, as it were. That would essentially solve everything.
@alan
Interesting, I think you could be right, how difficult would it be to implement though ? org-narrow-to-subtree does sort of what you are describing — but just shows the block on it’s own. I’m not sure if it’s in its own buffer, or if there is even any parsing, but maybe some of that implementation could be recycled/expanded into a new ones?
I have been thinking a lot about it now. If most of org’s abilities were excluded (you could open to the source buffer if you really needed to do something) and we were only really interested in the text, it shouldn’t be too difficult? I’ve seen a couple of solutions that should already be capable of displaying text from another file dynamically. Some font-locking and syntax that works with org (it doesn’t like leading *'s for headlines inside blocks, for instance), a couple of functions to keep things sync’d… It would be far from perfect, but it might at least be functional and wouldn’t suffer from overlay hell.
The prospect of transclusion coming to emacs is exciting, but I won’t hold my breath for seeing truly working and successful implementations soon, and even less so for org-mode specifically – some otherwise interesting attempts generally have trouble with org. I tried a couple of things and they generally freeze my session, interfere with normal functionality, or have unexpected behavior when editing around them.
I’m going to play around with some ideas over the next couple of weeks. If I manage anything interesting I’ll post it to the board.
Since pretty much everything here has likely been discussed in the zettlekasten.de community (which I see @cobblepot is a part of too!), a related thread.
