Wisen's notes

# 2020-05-21 Going with Bear for Zettelkasten

I’ve been evaluating the software that I can use to practice 2020-05-20 Discovering Zettelkasten.

There are three tools that I’ve tried:

  • Obsidian
  • Zettlr
  • Bear

I did sign up for Roam Research, which is currently super hyped, but I didn’t get any invite in time. I ended up not waiting for it as the Markdown export apparently is not usable in other apps.

I tried Obsidian, which was still in a private beta. I can imagine that some of the note I write will contain code, and unfortunately Obsidian doesn’t support code highlighting. It might be supported if I start to tweak it, but I don’t want to delve into such details. I really like the graph that it produces to link notes. As the tool is scanning through markdown files locally, I will be able to use Obsidian with any other tools in conjunction if I want to see the graph.

I tried Zettlr and it didn’t leave me with a good impression. Even though the app is super suitable for Zettelkasten, as it’s designed for it, the app crashed when I first tried it. When I left it running, it consumes 500% of my CPU.

Bear is really great. I immediately fell in love with Bear, and I have paid for it. The downside of this app is the missing automatic backlink. At some point, I would experiment with the following scripts:

One of the reason I like Bear is the fact that it’s also being use by Andy Matuschak, as I have been reading his notes a lot during my research. The note-link-janitor script above has been written by him too.

# References

  • Note-writing system
    • Even though the creation date of the note is useful, I couldn’t find a good way to include that in markdown file nicely. Using YAML front matter will be nice, but as I’ve decided that I’m 2020-05-21 Going with Bear for Zettelkasten, it doesn’t support YAML front matter. What I ended up relying on is the Bear stored creation date.