Bidirectional note linking?

OK! Great…now…how do we get you to move it to the top of the list.:wink:

By letting us chunk away through the items in the list that precede it :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I’ve used Agenda for a couple of years and hadn’t even seen the linked note feature. however, it’s only 1 way, at least in my computer.

I’ve used Noteplan on and off for a couple of years, and wasn’t aware they put back links. I tried the beta for 3 and didn’t see backlinks there. I didn’t like Noteplan 2’s interphase for some reason, perhaps because I’m not a big fan of tags. I actually switched to Noteplan from Bear because of this, and then switched to Agenda, because the folder system here works better in my brain. I did the beta for Noteplan 3, and the interphase is much better than 2. However, I still feel that Agenda’s filing system works better for me.

There is another app that support backlinks. It’s called Amplenote. I’ve been testing it for the past few days, and it’s good. I like its Daily Jots (similar to Roam’s daily entries) and the fact that you can enter Tasks with reminders in addition to notes. However, it also uses the tag system for folders. And it’s not as nice on the eyes as Craft. They also don’t have a Mac app yet. However, oddly enough, their Mac browser app supports dark view and the iOS app doesn’t.

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I agree with your take 100%. I tried Roam and felt in love with their linking system. It’s the thing I’ve always wanted with my notes that I didn’t know I needed. I just can’t justify its expense and the lack of good iOS apps, and a somewhat buggy browser. However, their linking system is definitely excellent.

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Take your time. I have always been impressed at how the Agenda team implemented a feature. It is always well thought out (some even exceed the original expectation) and I am sure many in the community appreciate it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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The latest versions on NP3 have a beautiful Implementation of back links on all platforms.

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But NB3 is a ‘closed’ system.

  1. Last time I checked, the folder structure for its notes does not allow it/(you) to access other outside folders in, e.g. iCloud. Thus keeping Obsidian on the Mac from accessing the markdown files.

  2. If you have other notes in an iCloud folder, it requires one to import the notes into it, then app takes the header in the 1st line of the note as the Title of the imported note, NOT the actual markdown title.

So, as a self contained app, its probably great. But if you would like a little more freedom with your notes…

This is not totally true. You can’t access files outside its folder in iCloud but you definitely can open the NP3 folder as an Obsidian vault. It works flawlessly from my testing over the last 2 months.

The title renaming is a known issue and one that Eduard is working on.

I know, :wink:, we’ve ‘talked’.

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Just a thought on this. I try to reduce or link all these apps around. And Agenda is quite close. When working on a project it helps to stay focused. Switching apps will disrupt my workflow. I think about it like an IDE (like PyCharm) - you can do your complete work there.

It would be great to have something similar for Paperwork.

  • Todos
  • Knowledge Management
  • Notes
  • Outlines for Development Projects
  • and so on.

Thus it’s crucial for me to get all this information linked. Linking this information helps a lot.

I would also really like back-linking features, like those implemented on Roam Research.

I understand the hype and letdown coming out of the Wiki craze - but I think that misconceptualizes the features we are looking for. Its not necessarily useful to [[printer]] and have bidirectional links between notes that mention [[printer]].

The feature I am hoping to get is more of a environment to zoom out, step back & understand the emergent connections between notes, tasks and categories across different projects. A way to explore and navigate your own personal experience base.

For example you could stumble into a 2-3 year old note on a project long closed that has a protip applicable to whatever your working on at the time.

If back-linking with [[markdown]] is not the goal - maybe there is a way to zoom out and visualize the notes made across timelines. parallel time-locked timelines for each separate project…

Note that Agenda can already handle a lot of links. Drag an email in, and you get a link to the email. Drag a file in, and hold CTRL as you drop it, and you get a link to the file. Same will work with other apps that provide links (URLs).

The discussion here was more about linking in Agenda itself. You can already do that, but some people want to have a backlink created when you make a link, ie, a two way link. We have some ideas about that …

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We certainly have some ideas about how to do back linking of some kind. But I’m not really understanding the whole “zoom out” idea. To me, the links provide navigation, at the note level. I don’t really see how they give you a “broader view”. Can you explain that? Are there other apps that give you such a view?

All I can think of are mind mapping apps, which technically are just links :wink:

appreciate the follow-up. in a sense, you are pulling back far enough to see links that were not explicity made by [[term]]. using that annotation, your right - its just bouncing around in a wikipedia hole - blue link to new blue link. not very macro.

my initial conceptualization of this idea was back in undergrad (2006ish), and back then there was not software that provided such a view. After struggling to find something that would somewhat achieve what I was hoping to do, realized that cutting up a refridgorator box and writing out important events or concepts out on this physical timeline was more helpful because I could “zoom in” to a few decades, or “zoom out” to the whole 4.5m years of human activity.

If we add very broad constraints of a “location” and a “time” to the wormhole travel across hyperlinks, there is now a contextual organization where navigation makes more sense. In my world, geolocation was the place and level of analyses are the timelines (gene, protein, molecule, tissue, organ etc…)…perhaps a video representation will be best…take it easy on me this was like a decade ago…

PS - in terms of “Are there other apps that give you such a view?”

Aeon Timeline is there with dynamically zoomable (in and out of scope) timelines populated with semantically enhance data sets. However, I dont think they allow you to stack timelines together, or do any sort of locking on the a time sync. and for sure, they do not have features that would allow you to make linkages between or across timelines that would then be “excited” or “inhibited” based on the strength or value or crowdsourced strengh - like is represented in the blue lines of the video.

As for note taking software, I think Agenda, Roam and the others mentioned in this thread are getting there - in so much as we have figured out how to make a connection, visualize the graph and then traverse it. There are no features that could attribute strength or value to those connections between concepts, notes or data that I am aware of.

Your right to call out that linking [[Daily Notes]] to 100 other [[Daily Notes]] is not providing any intellectual value or the beginning traces of a novel insight. So we have some work to do on that front.

As I explained in the description of the video, at the Neuroscience Information Framework we were making links between various ways to refer to the same thing (5HT, 5-hydroxytryptamine vs Serotonin) - so if Roam, or Notes or Obsidian prompted the user after a [[ ]] was made for other variants of ways to refer to that, or if the note taking apps pulled from ontologies that already exist - then we could start to make a graph worth exploring, now there would be some element of surprise or serendipity. Check out this article - NeuroLex.org: an online framework for neuroscience knowledge

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Another relevant aspect of Agenda for serendipitous relationships between notes in “related” notes.

I don’t think that is true unless I am misunderstanding your statement. My notes from np3 are In iCloud and you can actually change the type of file stored. A .txt or a .md.

I guess that would allow another program to access it?

I’m saying, that NP3, as far as I know, can not access any other folder in iCloud DRIVE, other than it’s own sandboxed folder(s).

Thanks for providing much more detail, that’s great stuff! As you mention already this is really an area of “research” and a lot of experimenting with UIs for timelines, nodes, pathways etc. I’m not sure if Agenda is the place to do that kind of experimentation, we will probably stick with simpler building blocks like links, tags and overviews for the foreseeable future. Having said that, having more powerful ways to integrate with other apps through callback urls and/or plugins would open up a lot of space for additional workflows or alternative visualisations, probably the way to go forward…

I agree with @dpurnomo. In the last year, being a heavy user of Evernote for more than a decade, I tried moving to Notion as the ONE tool to conquer all. I have left it after 10 months of exclusive use for a number of reasons, the main being lack of integration with basic things as my calendar, very poor performance in search functions and just limited support of pdf files. I went back to Evernote and I am happy with my return, but it’s not ideal for project management. At this point I am trying to use Agenda as project manager but the lack of backlinking limits its use. It’s too much hassle to create bidirectional links, indeed a “[[” shortcut that would open a search function for the note you want to create the link, would be ideal. Or at least, as an easier step to implement, when I am trying to create a link to a note (“insert” -> “link to”) give us the option to search for the note somehow. The way things are now, it’s far from convenient when you have a few more than a couple of dozen notes.

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