Logseq 🔗
Poking around with note-taking options, I finally came back around to Logseq, which I’ll reduce to “org-mode and Workflowy gang up on Obsidian.”
I was primed to not like it, but the org-mode syntax option and some relatively strong opinions about how things should be were compelling enough that I played around with it, then tried to implement a PARA-like structure, then watched a few videos to try to internalize how it wants you to behave.
The page link syntax is interesting. You can do either a traditional wikilinks double-brackets, or you can use #hashtag notation to link to a page, which – thanks to the inbound links section of each page – serves as a tag index.
Logseq solves the blank page problem by … well, it sort of doesn’t. It’s opinionated enough about its “everything is an outline, every line is a node” thing, as well as its “start from a journal page each day” thing, that you can tell it wants you to do something besides “make a page and start typing,” but you can’t be sure what.
I ended up deciding to just go with it. Sitting in the living room, staring at the blank daily journal page, I just made a node in the outline for the first thing that came to mind and dumped out my big projects and OKRs for the coming quarter. Then I dumped a packing list for a trip this week. Then some miscellaneous tasks to get done before I fly out.
Entering tasks, then thinking ahead to how I’d find them once I moved on to a new journal page the next day, led me to the Unfinished Business plugin, which will roll yesterday’s todos into today’s journal page. I think there are other ways to gather todos but my initial read of journal page todos vs. project or area todos is that they should be more ephemeral and bound to the day.
But I guess my summary, having messed around with this for all of 18 hours, and after a morning of using it for work, is that Logseq is very, very into the non-hierarchical, “networked notes” approach. It wants structure to be a matter of emergence.
Its main competitor for my attention is Denote, which is more of a collection of Legos with opinions that are less about your workflow and more about the metadata. I like the way Logseq provides a built-in backlink block automatically, though I could implement that with a capture template for Denote. I like Logseq’s more wiki-ish page creation conventions. I like that there’s a mobile app devoted to Logseq’s point of view, as opposed to the general-purpose mobile org clients.
It’s important, for org-mode people, to not go into this thinking it’s “org-mode with a native toolkit GUI.” You can use org-mode syntax in a list. There are some familiar org-mode conventions (e.g. src blocks). If you like everything being an outline, as in org-mode, you’ll be in familiar territory. But there’s a layer of plumbing that finds its way into the markup that org-mode is not going to make sense of if you ever depart Logseq. It’s instructive to set up a few pages where you’re transcluding nodes, etc. and then open those pages in Emacs to see what it does with them. In some cases, it can’t do anything because Logseq has its own markup overlay.
Dusting off the camera 🔗
I’ll be in Vancouver, BC this week for a work event, then staying over for a few days to do some tourism. Given the time of year and likely subject matters it’s an X-T5 kind of week. I’m just taking the 23mm/f1.4 WR. I considered the X100V, but I’d like the extra speed and the image stabilization.
I have not been very excited about photography lately, but the prospect of a new place and interesting scenery got me a little more excited. Looking forward to being out on the streets at night.
Wallabag bookmarking script 🔗
I submitted a PR for my Newsboat Wallabag bookmarking script. As with the Newsboat one, you can just run it from the command line, too, if you’re interested in some pre-written plumbing for Wallabag bookmarking. Just takes a URL as ARGV[0] and lets the Wallabag service pull all the metadata.