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Oh, that's not that I thought the title meant! Imagine if you could hyperlink as you handwrote notes, fluidly with the motion or gesture of the pen. As with te

Oh, that's not that I thought the title meant! Imagine if you could hyperlink as you handwrote notes, fluidly with the motion or gesture of the pen. As with text editors like emacs or *vim, you'd create new modes of thinking as you interact with a machine at the speed of thought, with the underpinning physical motions being too fast and too easy for conscious attention. Make wormholes from one part of the writing surface to a distant one, recording connections, asides, without conscious effort. No more than you expend on the shapes of letters, or the layout of QWERTY. Instead, we're kind of stuck on the UX of "ordered sequence of rectangles", with some usability hacks to mitigate the severe limitations of this skeuomorphism. Surely there must be some astounding low-hanging fruit here, in the UX of epaper handwriting as a tool of exploratory thought.

akkartik 4y ago
My sense is that the design goal of Zettelkasten is basically this. Why note cards? Why only a few sentences per card? So you can insert text in a fine-grained manner -- and so you can insert cross-links in a fine-grained manner.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Pretty much what I was going to suggest. More generally, with handwritten (or other physically-manifested writings), an indexing and referencing system substitutes for hyperlinks. The Bullet Journal index and references operate in a similar manner. The O'Reilly book UNIX Power Tools offers a print hypertext experience by numbering each individual article and section, and liberally referencing between these. The first edition is superior to later ones in that the text is printed in multiple colours (black and blue) which distinguish the text and navigational elements, much as early Web documents did with the standardisation of blue link colours. For those who remember such things, the paper and print card catalogues of libraries operated similarly.
jonwest 4y ago
It would be cool if there were a gesture for this within Remarkable, like if you underline a word and draw a line to another word or it pulls up a table of contents you could point to, then when you finish the line, your “link line” would disappear leaving only the underline.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  That's a neat idea. I was hoping the author would share an interesting strategy for linking to external documents inside a handwritten post. But I don't see any way it could be much more elegant that "I just wrote the URL down manually and linked the text to it," which is what they did. But linking to points inside the document, you could get pretty clever.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
_iyhy 4y ago
Something similar is being carried out by team at Muse.. https://museapp.com/memos/2022-09-linked-cards/ https://museapp.com/memos/2022-09-linked-cards/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
psychomugs 4y ago
My current note-taking stack is an Obsidian Vault on my iPad with the mazec handwriting keyboard [1] (this post was written with it), occasionally switching to Nebo [2] if I want a long-form writing experience. Apple's built-in scribble functionality would be great if it weren't so inaccurate and kludgy when correcting mistakes. I won't wax poetic about Obsidian more than others already have, but this setup gets me very close to the link-as-you-write workflow that I sorely wished I had in grad school. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mazec/id943711253 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mazec/id943711253 [2] https://www.nebo.app/ https://www.nebo.app/
8note 4y ago
Oh, haven't read the article yet, but expected the same thing. To make this work, I need a nice copy/paste method for pen+touch input to input the link, along with nice app switching. Otherwise, it should be drawing a circle around the marks, right click, add link. How do you click the links though?
- perihelions 4y ago
  Gestures on epaper will be absurdly, hilariously overpowered. Gesturing with fingers on touchscreen is sluggish and imprecise; it's not at all like handwriting (and who in the pre-digital era wrote books with the technique of finger-painting? It'd be absurd). But, how many distinct glyphs can you draw with a fine-tipped pen in a quarter of a second? 50? 100? Easily the entire Latin and Greek alphabets, just as a starting point. It's a high-bandwidth input channel, just like a PC keyboard. All you would need to control an epaper with gestures is to reserve some subset of the character-glyph space as an in-band control channel. Glyph shapes that are never semantically valid as written text. Shapes that are easy to reliably parse, which are highly "orthogonal" to written text, as well as to other control gestures. - "How do you click the links though?" I'd suggest they be interpreted as special "active" regions with a single default action, so any user input works, if it's within the region. Scratch a line over them and they open. My thinking is controlling the machine, and writing, should be the same actions and combine together fluidly: everything is a pen stroke.

akkartik 4y ago

My sense is that the design goal of Zettelkasten is basically this. Why note cards? Why only a few sentences per card? So you can insert text in a fine-grained manner -- and so you can insert cross-links in a fine-grained manner.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Pretty much what I was going to suggest. More generally, with handwritten (or other physically-manifested writings), an indexing and referencing system substitutes for hyperlinks. The Bullet Journal index and references operate in a similar manner. The O'Reilly book UNIX Power Tools offers a print hypertext experience by numbering each individual article and section, and liberally referencing between these. The first edition is superior to later ones in that the text is printed in multiple colours (black and blue) which distinguish the text and navigational elements, much as early Web documents did with the standardisation of blue link colours. For those who remember such things, the paper and print card catalogues of libraries operated similarly.

jonwest 4y ago

It would be cool if there were a gesture for this within Remarkable, like if you underline a word and draw a line to another word or it pulls up a table of contents you could point to, then when you finish the line, your “link line” would disappear leaving only the underline.

bee_rider 4y ago
That's a neat idea. I was hoping the author would share an interesting strategy for linking to external documents inside a handwritten post. But I don't see any way it could be much more elegant that "I just wrote the URL down manually and linked the text to it," which is what they did. But linking to points inside the document, you could get pretty clever.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

_iyhy 4y ago

Something similar is being carried out by team at Muse.. https://museapp.com/memos/2022-09-linked-cards/ https://museapp.com/memos/2022-09-linked-cards/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

psychomugs 4y ago

My current note-taking stack is an Obsidian Vault on my iPad with the mazec handwriting keyboard [1] (this post was written with it), occasionally switching to Nebo [2] if I want a long-form writing experience. Apple's built-in scribble functionality would be great if it weren't so inaccurate and kludgy when correcting mistakes. I won't wax poetic about Obsidian more than others already have, but this setup gets me very close to the link-as-you-write workflow that I sorely wished I had in grad school. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mazec/id943711253 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mazec/id943711253 [2] https://www.nebo.app/ https://www.nebo.app/

8note 4y ago

Oh, haven't read the article yet, but expected the same thing. To make this work, I need a nice copy/paste method for pen+touch input to input the link, along with nice app switching. Otherwise, it should be drawing a circle around the marks, right click, add link. How do you click the links though?

perihelions 4y ago
Gestures on epaper will be absurdly, hilariously overpowered. Gesturing with fingers on touchscreen is sluggish and imprecise; it's not at all like handwriting (and who in the pre-digital era wrote books with the technique of finger-painting? It'd be absurd). But, how many distinct glyphs can you draw with a fine-tipped pen in a quarter of a second? 50? 100? Easily the entire Latin and Greek alphabets, just as a starting point. It's a high-bandwidth input channel, just like a PC keyboard. All you would need to control an epaper with gestures is to reserve some subset of the character-glyph space as an in-band control channel. Glyph shapes that are never semantically valid as written text. Shapes that are easy to reliably parse, which are highly "orthogonal" to written text, as well as to other control gestures. - "How do you click the links though?" I'd suggest they be interpreted as special "active" regions with a single default action, so any user input works, if it's within the region. Scratch a line over them and they open. My thinking is controlling the machine, and writing, should be the same actions and combine together fluidly: everything is a pen stroke.