Supernotes has a unique advantage over other atomic note taking tools—its “child card” concept creates four explicit/implicit relationship types between cards:
- Child: explicit via “create child card”
- Parent: implicit via the two-way parent-child relationship
- Sibling: implicit when cards share the same parent
- Friend: explicit via “add link”, and implicit via backlinks
Both the List
and Broadsheet
views use this relationship metadata to render a consistently structured “page”; where the parent card is always at the top, the children/sibling cards are underneath, and the friends are visible as links (and backlinks) in the cards.
I’d argue that the spatial consistency of these two views increases their usability for reading, exploration, and navigation.
Graph
view lacks this spatial consistency, and doesn’t currently make much use of the valuable relationship metadata. I’d argue that makes Graph
view much less usable for exploration and navigation.
ExcaliBrain (a plugin for Obsidian) takes an interesting approach to rendering a graph with spatial consistency; by using relationship metadata to place the different relationship types in different locations. This particular approach makes a lot of sense to me (and feels similar to the benefits we already get from spatial consistency in the List
and Broadsheet
views).
@Tobias Do you agree with the assertion about the usability benefits of spatial consistency? If so, what do you think about the idea to create an augmented version of Graph
view, which uses relationship metadata to create spatial consistency?