Autocomplete binder titles that contains "dot"

Ah! That explains the “ID” looking prefix then; I should have realised that is what you were doing as it would be a strange way to number things in a book. I completely understand what you are doing, and yes that makes sense to have it in the title. That is what I do as well with a similarly designed system.

I use numbers (a compressed date and time basically), which tends to work well with auto-complete, but my system has a heavier chronology focus than topical, as ZK does.

Thanks for the reply, and If you can point me to other sources on how to manage this kind of project inside Scriver, I’d much appreciate it.

So one thing you can do with a system like this is use the Quick Search tool in the main toolbar. To use your example, you could type in “propried” or however much it takes to find it—or even the ID if you know it. Once what you want to see pops up in the list, drag and drop from the search result list into the editor. Now you have a link pointing to the item. Obviously you don’t need the brackets in that case since the result is already a link.

Even though that involves using the mouse, I often find that to be the most efficient tool, because you don’t need to know how the title begins, or every word within it, or even the title at all because you will find it also locates text matches too. It depends. I use a combination of double-brackets, quick search and even Copyholders to manage linking.

The last one might seem odd, until you consider that a copyholder sticks to the editor no matter where you navigate to, and dragging the icon out of its header bar into the other text editor creates a link. I just make it as small as possible and drag it out whenever needed. This trick is thus very handy when you have developed a new thought that you would like to network it with multiple existing cards.

I’ve tryed The Archive and Zettlr, but I find that the time I spend trying to learn how to use new software is better spent reading and writing the thesis. Besides, it’s much easier to integrate between two Scrivener files than The Archive and Scrivener or any other combination.

I’ve tried both of those as well, and found Zettlr to be the more interesting of the two, but as much as it has a more focused framework for this kind of note-taking than Scrivener does, the overall project window interface feels more capable to me, particularly where it comes to long-form writing (but that’s to be expected). However for some reason what works well for long-form writing seems to also work well for lots of really short “cards” that are linked together.

Here are some posts that might give you some ideas:

  • Using a project as a scratch pad replacement. I wrote about how the user interface can make such a difference above. Well one of those things that makes Scrivener ideal, to me, is how flexible it is interface is. This project template demonstrates a way of turning Scrivener into a tool that is very focused on rapid note taking in a more “flat list of linked cards” way. This project doesn’t even use the binder!

  • Creating an external “inbox” for your project. If your notes often come from outside of Scrivener, maybe even from outside of your computer, this can be handy. You can set up a folder where you save .txt/.md/.rtf files and have those automatically imported into the project the next time you load it.

    An interesting thing here though is that if you use that feature more as intended, as a way of editing the contents of your binder with other tools, this can open up the use of other tools that are also file system oriented. I haven’t tried it with Zettlr, but in theory I think it should work fine with a folder of .md files. You can kind of have the best of both worlds here, in other words!

  • Integrating two projects together with external links: it looks like you are already on top of this, but just in case, this makes the “notepad” style project idea above more interesting.

  • Tips for linking in Scrivener: you probably already know most of this, but at the bottom of that post is another list of links on topics (some already here).

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