---
title: Zettlr Discussion Part 1
date: 2022-02-18T18:00:00+0100
location: Zettlr Discord server
---

# 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
- **Going forward**:
- We will schedule a number of meetings in the upcoming weeks, where people will run participants through how they work as of now, followed by a discussion section. The idea is to record them and upload them (possibly onto the Zettlr YouTube channel)
- Potential candidates (please add your name/remove the question mark if you'd like to present and discuss your workflow, it's not about providing a perfect workflow, more about discussing it, getting feedback from others and thus improving):
- Hendrik Erz
- Arthur Perret
- Frank Carver?
- Riia Jarvenpaa
- Others (Leo, Riia) have volunteered to tackle the issue of documenting all available features better, and also update the tutorial to make it a full-fledged demo-project that showcases every feature, not just a few selected ones --> see this discussion: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/discussions/3227
- The Zettlr main page needs to be overhauled, this should be discussed as well (the claim is not good ["A Markdown editor for the 21st century"] and the site overall is kind of outdated)

## Additional Notes

### Hendrik Erz

- I am quite surprised by how productive this first meeting was; a lot of participants and we all got a good initial round of seeing how people worked, the screen sharing feature of Discord really shined here
- Important topics that were discussed and which should be deepened going forward are:
- How to use a graph view?
- Different ways of taking notes
- What should a note be, and what not? (e.g. the length, definition of atomicity, file names vs. IDs, concepts, people, other "things" to create or not create notes for?)
- Maybe have people prepare small mini-workshops where they focus on one particular method/tool to write academically (Zotero, Zettlr, Cosma, graph views, reading notes, etc.)
- I will upload the presentation I showcased during the meeting to my personal website later (hendrik-erz.de); it includes specifically this slide: 
- I'll probably also make that into a proper article on the blog
- I'll be scheduling an event going forward where I run everyone who's interested through my own workflow, which we can then discuss, and which could hopefully serve as an invitation for others to do so too -- these meetings should be about getting better at writing!

### Riia Järvenpää (you can leave the dots out of my last name, its ok:))

First of all, thank for everyone!

Couple of general topics we discussed, but I'm not quite sure did we arrive to conclusions or were there specific tips how to tackle these questions:

- How to connect and make cards out of sources that do not have traditional academic journal structure? Many of us are using e.g. blog posts and news paper articles as references.
- Should we use ID's or file names for internal linking? Which one is more futureproof?
- How could the filenames and types be used in a productive way?

My takes from the meeting, in short:

1. I will have to start using templates/snippets option in Zettlr right now: otherwise I will have to format so many cards again.
2. I only now had time to read the blog posts by [Arthur Perret.](https://www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2022-02-17-analyze-synthesize-visualize.html) Thanks for thoughfull insight about how to approach graphical views of linked personal data. I'll definitely try the tool Cosma.
3. I have to admit some of the details in the discussion went over my head. E.g. importing the metadata from different sources: I'm not sure was some of it possible to do with the Asset Manager, or should I have a custom JSON pipeline for that?

I have not yet figured out how to avoid the task of having to add keywords several times to different software I'm using, namely literature mapping tools as [Litmaps](https://www.litmaps.co/) or [Research Rabbit](https://www.researchrabbit.ai/), Zotero for references, [Tropy](https://tropy.org/) for indexing visual material, and finally the cards in an actual knowledge management system. The keywords in each system could serve quite the same functions, but I have not figured out how to import them from one system to another.

I would also intrested what people use to integrate the tools or to assist in having things in a reasonable order: e.g. Zotero-plugins, apps for tabular data and so on.

4. Yes that's the last point today: I have become really used to having charts and tables for everything I do. And some sources advice putting the most [relevant literature to chart](https://guides.library.vcu.edu/health-sciences-lit-review/organize) to be able to cross-check which papers have similar methods, theories, concepts and do they support your thesis.

That's why I've been testing also tools such as [Airtable](https://wrythings.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/an-introduction-to-airtable-data-management-for-your-fyp/), [Notion](https://notesfromthephysicslab.com/2021/04/25/doing-a-literature-review-using-digital-tools/) and [Coda](https://coda.io/@arek-zarowski/data-science-research-project/literature-review-7). There are templates for doing literature review on those platforms - but these have not really worked for me out-of-the-box anyhow. Would like to see more examples of how to structure the "read-papers-data" in a meaningful way.

And yes I have been now trying to implement this quite rigorous structure for my scientific writing, but I can tell more about it, when I see whether it works :) Tagging and connected cards are essential in trying to make it happen.

### Arthur Perret

I’d like to archive one little debate we had regarding links.

Hendrik mentioned that he recently started using file names instead of identifiers inside the double brackets for links, e.g. `[[A great note]]` instead of `[[20220218180000]] A great note`.

He gave two arguments in favor of this:

1. links based on file names are self-explanatory (implying the other ones aren’t);
2. you can link to a file name that doesn’t exist, and some applications like Obsidian obligingly display these.

I was not convinced (it showed).

First, **links based on file names aren’t self-explanatory, they’re just more readable**.

Sure, `[[20220218180000]] A great note` is more cumbersome than `[[A great note]]` but it’s also more future-proof. If you use file names, you need a program to update links to files that you may rename. Obsidian does this. But it makes you dependent on that feature. You may prefer to keep unique identifiers, and get a program that eases the reading experience by shrinking the IDs somehow (Typora does this for editing; we do this in Cosma for exports by allowing you to replace link text with any Unicode string, like ☞).

Oh, and neither `[[20220218180000]] A great note` or `[[A great note]]` are particularly self-explanatory. If you’re looking for explanation, you might want to look at what’s surrounding the link, e.g. `Smith wrote extensively on [[20220218180000]] idea A.`. Which is why contextualized backlinks are so useful (and a feature of Cosma). You might also want to use link types, e.g. `Concept 2 is related to [[parent:20220218180000]] concept 1.`, especially if this is translated visually somehow (as in, guess where… Cosma!).
> [name=Frank Carver] I think that the argument between linking by id and linking by title may be a bit of a false dichotomy. We don't have this argument about URL links or citation links because Zettlr does a little bit of magic to overlay the link with the descriptive text. I see no reason not to do that for internal links and gain the reliability benefits of linking by ID **and** the readability benefits of linking by title.
>

Second, **don’t link to files that don’t exist: just create them**.

This is where I got a bit carried away. But I find that idea ridiculous. “Pre-creating” the note by linking to a non-existent file serves absolutely zero useful purpose. Sure, it saves you the time it would’ve taken you to create the note—5 seconds, tops. As Dr. Lazarus said in *Galaxy Quest*, “By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings…”

I think this idea comes from people who worry about where to put a note, to the point where they’re worried to create notes altogether. If you don’t create the file, you don’t have to worry about where to put it… Genius! It’s a great way to stay in denial about the fact that you’re pouring things into an everything bucket without thinking about knowledge organization. It’s the collector’s fallacy all over again.

Just create the damn note.
> [name=Frank Carver] On the whole, I agree, but there are still things Zettlr could improve to make this process easier, such as a button to extract some text to another file, and the ability to set up a default snippet for a folder or a whole workspace.
>

### Frank Carver
I scribbled some notes during the meeting, but as I began to enter them into a Zettlr page the scope continued to grow until I ended up with (so far) around 4000 words of structured thoughts and observations. That seems too big to just paste into here, so I have created another HackMD document and titled it ["Whither Zettlr"](https://hackmd.io/@ZyBG2fDcQ5yi0ckzqNysdw/Sk38hr8e5). All comments and suggestions welcome!