This is a living agenda document. For every monthly meeting, please add items to the agenda that you would like to see discussed related to being a PhD-student at IAS (for example questions regarding funding). We will meet on every Super Tuesday and discuss the agenda as it is present in here. PhD meeting, 28 April 2025 -Board meeting update: Group will get smaller. We should stand out ground in terms of administrative tasks. -Discussion of phd retreat: Will send out survey PhD meeting, 4 March 2025 -Check in

# Zettlr UI/UX

Previous reading notes are here (Discussion, part 1) Frank's initial document is here (Whither Zettlr) cobblepot's initial document is here (Software for notes and academic writing) Hendrik's initial document is here (On the Future of Zettlr) roys it is a very good tool for academics/researchers, yes References are cool (core feature?) LaTeX looks cool, but obvs. hard to understand

As in every discipline, social scientists need to read and take reading notes. I keep all of mine in Zettlr. Here I describe how I take them. Preconsiderations Firstly, I have created my own workspace in Zettlr where I store all my reading notes. That is: I created a folder inside my Nextcloud (you can also use Dropbox, OneDrive, or just have a folder without syncing it anywhere), and then I pressed Cmd/Ctrl+O in Zettlr to open that folder as a top-level workspace. This way I have all my reading notes in a single space, and I can limit the global search to that specific workspace to only search in my reading notes. Creating Snippets Next, it is important to note that in my area (Analytical Sociology) we have broadly speaking two types of texts to work with:

A few weeks ago, a debate broke out on the Zettlr Discord server on what Zettlr actually is, and what it isn't. This debate is certainly not new, but it has gained much more traction than earlier, which is due to the increasing popularity and maturity of Zettlr as an academic tool for writing and note-keeping. For many years, I have refrained from deepening the discussion too much, but the problems in not having a clear mission statement are mounting so much that they start to become real blockers in any progress with regard to the feature set. Frank Carver has in this document outlined in a very detailed, analytic, and sorted way, what he perceives Zettlr to be, and what not to be. He has created a basis for discussion which ultimately should lead towards a white paper to once-and-for-all stop the wild-growth that is Zettlr's feature set and instead streamline the efforts towards a sustainable app that can be developed further and can provide use-cases among the note-taking market, which is getting fuller by the minute. This document is both a reply to Frank's thoughts and an attempt to further his ideas. I personally believe that he has written the most comprehensive analysis of the app thus far, and therefore this document should not be seen as a counter-statement, but rather as an extension that builds on this work. How it came to this Let me start off with some background. This will serve two causes: First, it will make some of the mess more understandable because it will highlight my intentions behind what I did, and how I did it. And second, it will highlight the many non-strategic decisions I have made over the years, while the project gradually moved from a two-weeks semester break project to a full-fledged FOSS endeavour — without me knowing.

Zettlr Initial Discussion Everything in this pad will be dumped into some git repository and uploaded to a website after completion. The next pads will be filled in during a seminar session, but since we came up with the idea only during the meeting, this one will be filled a posteriori. Everyone who participated in today's session is warmly invited to add their minutes here until tomorrow, Feb 19th, 8pm (CET), which is when I will dump its contents. General Notes The general topic of this meeting was to discuss ways of working academically with Zettlr (+ Cosma) It was not a structured session, but rather an initial meetup to collect ideas to go further