There have been some more recent discussions as well. Here are a few that may interest you:
- The merits of different linking methods for ZK style titles. This started out with a fairly specific question, but the discussion went into some various different areas of usage.
- General usage for note-taking. Here the discussion was not about ZK specifically, but there is a huge area of overlap with general note-taking discussions and that, since most of ZK is about what you do in the note itself rather than around it. It’s the latter part that Scrivener is going to be exceptional, whereas in my experience it’s the other way around for most other tools of this nature. The organisational systems are quite simple and depend almost entirely upon content cues.
I think that’s probably a good starting point, since both of those branch out with links to many other discussions (some overlapping).
As you will read, I am very much in favour of putting the ZK ID into the binder title. If that is all you have to look up a note by (which is how I do things anyway, for brevity) then there are more tools for title look-ups in general, like link completion, or Quick Search which favours matches the start with the text you typed, or even how you can right-click on any text in the editor and it will look up titles that contain the text you clicked on. It will help you build hard hyperlinks better, and also make it so you maybe don’t need quite so many hard links (similar to how some tools have an “Unlinked references” listing).
This is something I did mess with a bit, but as I never really got on board with the proliferation of topical keywords, preferring instead to have a more procedural and compact hierarchical designation, so this feature never helped me out much. But if you’re the sort that gets benefit from putting #topic_a, #topic_b below a title line, then yeah Keywords will work for that. Scrivener’s implementation may leave a little be desired, I’ll warn. It depends on where you come from and what you’ve enjoyed using in other tools, but it is decidedly a bit old-school and in much need for modernisation. The world has moved on with this idea, since its inception (it came from an era when people thought of keywords as a type of database field you query against, not as agile tags that are a construct of both preparation and a reaction to usage as content).
I have begun the transfer of my physical Zettelkasten to Scrivener…
To jump back to this one: if you have a scanner or some other efficient way of making the original card digital, Scrivener’s split view is extremely efficient for getting bulk notes over and transcribed. Some commands and tips that can help you out there:
- The
Navigate ▸ Go To ▸ Next|Prev Documentshortcuts. With this you can flip up and down between entries in a folder.- However, what I like to do is use that shortcut to very quickly skim through the whole “stack” in the folder. What that does is populate the editor history with each card, one after the other. Hold that thought…
- In the split you are using to type them up,
Ctrl+N/⌘Nmakes a new card and keeps the cursor there so you can get straight to typing up the next card. Ctrl+Tabgets you back and forth between splits easily. Close the binder for even more efficiency, as this shortcut by default rotates between binder, editor 1 and editor 2. With the binder closed you get simple alternation.- Now back to where I was with the card split having all of the cards in history. Instead of jumping back and forth between splits and using the Next|Prev shortcut, check out
Navigate ▸ Editor ▸ Forward|Backward in History. Putting two and two together then, you can be typing up one card, get to the end of it, hit the shortcut to make a new chunk of text to type into, then the shortcut to flip backward in history in the card split, without moving your cursor around, and thus keep typing away.
- Now back to where I was with the card split having all of the cards in history. Instead of jumping back and forth between splits and using the Next|Prev shortcut, check out
- Lastly, in the typing split you may want to quickly get back to a card you already transcribed, if you spot a connection that should be made. The normal history shortcuts can help there, but also remember you can flip to Corkboard view, arrow up to where you want to go, and then use Spacebar to dive back in (if that opens a separate window, you can change that in the Behaviours: Navigation preference pane (on Windows, that’s just how it works, no options, and very weirdly, it does not work from the Outliner). So that can be better for “longer distance” jumps, but of course once you do that a quick
Ctrl+[/⌘[gets you right back to the card you were transcribing before going on a tangent.
It may seem like a bit of fluster, but if you’re like me and have hundreds if not thousands upon thousands of bits of paper to transcribe, then every little reduction in the checklist of shortcuts or mouse clicks involved matters! Eventually these shortcuts become second nature and you’ll be flying through cards, thinking of little but the content they contain.