In my current use of supernotes, I find myself wanting a few more niceties around linking in related notes to a card during editing. I think there are a variety of ways to solve these problems (and I think the supernotes team will probably come up with better solutions than I can), so I’m keeping the request here kind of vague, but I’ll list a few “friction points” that hopefully help illustrate what I mean.
I use supernotes to take “literature notes” on books I’m reading, for example Caliban and the Witch. I organize these by creating a parent card to represent the book. Then, when I have an insight/point of interest I want to capture, I add a child card, usually in the form of a proposition such as “Witch Hunts were the Dark Underbelly of Rationalization”. After I finish the book, I update the parent card with a synopsis. When I write this synopsis, it’s good to furnish it with links to a few of the major points I captured as child notes during reading, however, this is sometimes tricky for the following reasons:
Card names in the link window are often truncated. This can make it tricky to fully distinguish between my literature notes in some cases, since most of my titles these days are fairly long, being complete or semi-complete propositions.
The cards listed in the linking modal are sorted by recency by default. This means that if I’ve jumped around in my collection and edited a series of other notes recently, the cards that I really want to see for linking (the children of the book card) are not immediately in the modal list. I can search to find them, but it might be hard to remember precisely the names of all the child cards.
When editing the book note, I usually have it open in the noteboard, so the child cards I’m interested in are on screen, but there’s no easy way to scroll and reference them to see their titles and spark possible linkages while editing. I’d have to end the editing task, then browse the cards, then re-edit if doing so sparked any new possible connections I’d want to link in.
After I link a card in, there’s no way to confirm that it was the card I intended (I have to do this sometimes because my titles are longish and the modal truncates them). The card ID is present in the markdown link, but I don’t know the card IDs by heart, so I can’t use that to confirm it was the right link. Instead, I need to cease editing and click the link to see if it was the card I intended, or use the auto-link (no label) and see if the title is what I expect then add the label – this works well enough in most cases, but sometimes I still need to double check the card content as well.
In some sense links of this nature are somewhat redundant (since they are already children of the parent card) but I still like embedding them in my synopses nonetheless. In some ways, it helps give certain of the child insight cards “prominence” insofar as I elected to incorporate them into a general synopsis.
I guess, in general, a lot of this would be solved by some means to restrict link suggestions to children of the parent, or some other facilities around controlling scope of card search when using the linking modal.
Tangentially related, it might be nice to have a streamlined link manager to quickly update the target card for any of the links in a card (preserving labels except in the empty label case) without having to drop into the full editor.
P.S. Sorry to come in with a feature request so soon after 3.2 dropped. Part of the reason I’m here is that 3.2 has revitalized my usage of the app, and by using it more I’m running into all sorts of new wants!
I second this. It is currently my biggest inconvenience using sn.
I too take “literature notes”, and since I use a shared prefix for any such note’s title referring to it’s source (e.g. Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Nesslabs: This is the actual title, which often takes almost all of the visible space of the title in the list), it oftentimes comes to me having to guess which link to choose in the selector menu.
I would like to be able to have the ability to somehow peek into the cards before I link to them.
What’s your use case for that? The reason I ask is because I used to do something similar in earlier versions of Supernotes, when the search didn’t take parents into account. Now the search is so good that I haven’t needed to add any extra context into the titles. I.e. I can keep them purely focussed on summarising the idea in the note.
The reason I adopted this pattern is that I want to identify that a note is a literature note on one sight, regardless its parent and even when linking to it.
However, it has been a longvtime since I made that commitment. In the meantime I emloyed a color coding scheme to reflect the card type. Plus, as you say, search has improved a great deal. So you might have asked just the right question, as it seems the reasons I follow this naming scheme no longer exist. I guess I will actually consider changing it as the benefit of enhanced focus is evident. So, thank you for implanting that thought
Having said that, the request still applies for situations where I don’t remember the exact title. In this case, the ability to peek if the selected note is the correct one would be a nice feature.
I agree. I think that would be a useful feature, and one that I’d use too.
That’s an interesting approach. I use tags to define card types.
Using tags allows me to have as many card types as necessary, they’re visible in the search results, and I don’t need to remember anything. So far it seems to be scaling well.
I decided actively against tags because their visibility is too low for my liking. Other than tags, colors show in any card that link to a colored card, in graph view, and do not compete with other usages of tags. It works for me because I have only 5 card types.
I think I’m after something similar. For me I have many process driven notes that I use for work and at times these processes reference different terms and technologies. I’ve been looking for a way to keep my notes as clean as possible, so linking notes within feels too messy; tags only kind of works, it keeps things organised but if you then go to select a tag it just applies a filter in the background which forces you to leave the note you’re currently viewing.
I like the idea of backlinks, but of course they only reference the parent card, and what I need is a cross reference linking draw so I can bounce between notes seamlessly.
concept. A definition or description of some concept, and only that.
insight. An assertion refering to some concept or a relation among several concepts, as an original brainchild of mine.
report. A note on an event in time, with a timestamp, e.g. meeting minutes, journal entries, …
reference. A note on something found in an external source, e.g. quotes, excerpts, …
article. Bonus type that contains long-form, non-atomic elaborations on some topic.
I too have cards for a person, a book, and I use tags for that. I don’t consider that as a “type”. EDIT: To clarify, those are characterizations of a concept card.
@freisatz Thank you for sharing! I love how simple and concise your system is.
You’ve inspired me to reflect on which of my “types” are actually types. Perhaps there’s a way to simplify my system to have fewer top-level types too.
I will add that for better linking discoverability, it would be great to have the ability to directly Insert a [[link]] from the search results, especially since the new search has a nice preview of the cards.
I love how simple and concise your system is. 