merged and published 🙂

@User Thanks for the onboarding session yesterday. I appreciated going over the over the use of Dendron functions step by step and clarifying my questions.

I'm finding utility with the

link

function now. At first I didn't understand the use of the

link

over the

scratchpad

, but combined the schemas and the auto-new note auto-naming features, I'm feeling the magic. It's allowing me a workflow of extrapolating on a thought without the anguish of what to name or where to save the new note. The workflow feels natural and I dont need to worry about "misplacing" the note. Just shift-backarrow to select the text, cmd+L, select link, write some thoughts, and ctrl-tab back to writing the original note. I'm also using it by copy-pasting entire source articles into a Dendron and using

link

to write my own notes on parts, while keeping the source article intact. Great design thinking!

It solves Obsidian's issue of messy file names and messy sidebar with the answer of a simple input sequence that requires almost no cognitive effort . It gives the not having to think about what to name or where to put a new note and zoom into text features of Dynalist, except you can zoom into single words instead of a whole line. It feels like having your cake and eating it too.

This sounds like something I should be doing as well. Can you share details of your workflow or describe an example?

@User @User here's an example of using scratch notes for todos: https://dendron.so/notes/593206ea-5658-4874-bafd-18a138870f91.html

@User Sure,

1. I start off with the source for all the material that I have to learn for the course and Copy Pasting it in plain text to Dendron. This will become my Syllabus page in Dendron.

2. I use regex to format the page . VSCode has a beautiful regex search and replace function that can preview the changes you're about to make.

If I had used a javascript console instead it would be

str.replace(/","/g\n);

.

What I have now is a syllabus of the material I have to master. I plan on reviewing one topic a day.

3. Lecture day. When I'm ready to take my notes on the subject, I highlight the part in my syllabus and use

dendron.Link

to pull it into a new page.

For now, I'm using H6 headings as the most atomic parts of my notes. During notetaking, my eyes are on the lecture and the VSCode window is minimized. All I want to do it type and take down information, I don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to think about formatting.

Here's my notes. I wish markdown syntax ignored tab indents so I can use them for formatting and folding instead of having intented text parsed as code blocks. Does anyone know of a workaround for this?

4. After the lecture. Now I have the cognitive bandwidth to look at how my notes look like. I'm going to use atomize my notes by using

Dendron.Link

to pull each H6 marked question it into its own note nested under the Dendron hierarchy, then Ctrl+Shift+R, Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+V key seqeunce to copy the tranclusion back to the note. What I have now are flashcard level notes. Later this week going to try configuring the

VSCode Anki

addon to push these notes into my anki with a backlink back to Dendron.

So I also have a document that is a overview of the entire lecture. I might print these out to keep a physical copy of my notes. At the same time, I have atomicized flashcards of topics, that I can transclude in a lecture note. For example, when I get to a lecture on poisons, I'll include that flashcard on oxidative phosphorylation as a visual reminder of what I learned in today's lecture. Dendron would give me backlink too, and I would be able to see the link that some poisons work by inhibiting oxidative phosphorylation It works just like in Roam and Tiddlywiki. But with Dendron, I also get: a. Local access to all my notes. Plus, my notes are all in Markdown format, which means I can batch edit, rename, do whatever I need to them using VSCode and regex,

sed

,

touch

, etc. I hate having to mindlessly manually edit things that could be done with code, and I don’t have the time or knowledge to write scripts to bulk edit HTML or database data, but well documented regex scripts are accessible to a non-technical user like me. I can avoid Roam holding my entire knowledgebase for ransom unless I pay them monthly. That's extortion, not SAAS. Plus Roam doesnt have a mobile client. With Dendron, I have my vault synced to Dropbox and use Epsilon Notes as a mobile client to view them. I can also open and refactor my headings with XMind. Markdown format means being able to choose the best "frontend clients" for my "backend database" of markdown notes.

b. The freedom to use parsing scripts to send my notes fo Anki. I like Anki's UI and spaced repetition algorithms better then Remnote's. There's

python.BeautifulSoup

to parse HTML, plus someone a made Markdown to Anki script, and then someone else made that into a VSCode extension. Open source + the Unix philosophy is a beautiful thing. c. Being able to use VSCode as my text editor. VS code provides just the right balance of low friction and high power for me to save time. I can do everything I just did with my note in Obsidian, but I'd have to open up a terminal to the right directory and use

sed

. It's just faster to pull up a regex enabled search-and replace. Plus, I get to use my own snippets and shortcuts. d. Dendron's design and commands enable a nice flow while notetaking. Attention to detail, like having separate

extract

,

link

and

scratchnote

commands, minimizes having to open up new windows and copying back and forth, which disorients me. The commands seems like they do similar things, but they're designed to be used during different situations, and when you’re in the moment trying to capture information and not fall behind, having the tool to do what you’re looking for is a blessing.

5. Now when I open my syllabus, I can see at a glance what subjects I've covered and how much left I have to do. I set the syllabus page as my "home page" when I open VSCode. so it's like having a syllabus on the cover of your physical three ring binder notebook. Again, I can make this in Obsidian or Tiddlywiki but it would take longer and involve more copy-pasting.

The beautiful thing about Dendron is that it visualizes both X and Y axises of the b-tree of all your notes, and the way chose to use

extract

and

transcibe

organizes the X-axis by hierarchy of atomicization and the Y-axis by topic. When I'm done with creating all my DAT exam notes, I'll end up with a clickable and labeled fractal tree mindmap that's not only beautiful, but lets me navigate my notes. I don't have to think too much about "*where did I put that piece of information?*" or rely on grep to find it, I have it visualized in front of me. And another awesome part of Dendron, is that a note can be both a note or a node. As someone with ADHD, this visual and well organized way of navigating information is a natural fit. Once I fill my syllabus full of notes, that feature fill become very handy in both navigating my notes and giving context to the note that I have open in front of me.

Once I have more notes, the utility of this view in Dendron will become more clear in the screenshots. I'll keep posting updates as I go along.

@User Thanks for sharing your workflow, I'm a student too so definitely going to implement some in my workflow > I wish markdown syntax ignored tab indents so I can use them for formatting and folding instead of having intented text parsed as code blocks. Does anyone know of a workaround for this? Add this snippet and it'll work:

"toggle": {

"prefix": "toggle",

"body": [

"<details><summary> ${1} </summary>",

"<p>",

"${2}",

"</p>",

"</details>",

I'm not sure if it works when published, but it works well in the markdown preview (like the screenshot)

Works in the dendron-preferred markdown preview too

Ah yep, that's the work-around I've been using for a while, just

<details><summary></summary></details>

. It works in Obsidian and Typora too, though you'd need to bind the snippet via Autohotkey or another tool. It will work when published because it's HTML code, and Markdown gets converted to HTML when it's rendered. You can collapse tables that way too.

@User kudos for the amazing case study. really like the workflow that you created here 🙂 would love to feature it in our case studies section if you're open to it. we have lots of students using dendron and i think they would benefit from your great write up. https://dendron.so/notes/34ee4bcf-60e9-4031-a4c0-26113b5acb80.html

@HeyyyyJinn thanks a lot for spending the time to share all your workflow! I wasn't even aware of these extraction capabilities. Definitely something to add to my workflow too

@User @User welcome to dendron 🥳 we're a welcoming community of note takers figuring out how to think better. please introduce yourselves and how you found us. this is me 👋 > Hey everyone, > > My name is Kevin and I'm the founder of Dendron. Note taking has been an obsession passion of mine for as long as I can remember. After having amassed a corpus of +10k markdown notes, I created Dendron because I couldn't find any other tool that could let me manage it all. Before Dendron, I worked at AWS for 5+ years. Feel free to message me on all note taking and non-note taking related topics 🙂 @User

> @User kudos for the amazing case study. really like the workflow that you created here 🙂 > > would love to feature it in our case studies section if you're open to it. we have lots of students using dendron and i think they would benefit from your great write up. > > https://dendron.so/notes/34ee4bcf-60e9-4031-a4c0-26113b5acb80.html @User I'd be happy to help. I'll be putting a lot of notes into Dendron over the next few weeks and screenshots or video of navigating that collection might be good at showing the benefits of Dendron's approach.. I'll refine it a bit more and add some more screenshots during use before publishing it?

@User sounds great. whenever you feel you're ready 🙂 our site is just another dendron vault and anyone can make edits. you can find instructions to do so here: https://dendron.so/notes/125c990b-6fe7-4ada-a65f-44cbde8b33f0.html

also - one trick i use for copy/pasting text --> I will first copy it into notion or use the notion web clipper to clip it. it will format it nicely in markdown. i will then paste the contents into dendron 🙂

Thanks to @HeyyyyJinn I learned about references and that's extremely useful. However I have issues with block references. How can I refer to headings which contain spaces? My intention is this: I use the daily journal to note what happens and Infos from meetings. At the same time I have notes for people I work with regularly and store there the main items of each meeting. What I'd like to do is to refer in the daily journal note to the header of the corresponding meeting notes. The headings are date and time like 2020-10-14 10:00. Can I somehow use this in a block reference? I tried putting it within " or ' but that doesn't seem to work. Replacing the spaces by _ works but isn't very nice