Zettelkasten for Regular Emacs Hackers
Christian Tietze (he) - @ctietze@mastodon.social https://christiantietze.de https://zettelkasten.de, hi@christiantietze.de
Format: 20-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room
Status: Waiting for video from speaker
Description
There's this one thing you can do with your Emacs that is not chiefly a technological problem to solve: thinking through writing.
Emacs offers a malleable environment where you can tweak every key stroke, and every pixel on screen to your needs.
Since we're all here at EmacsConf, the intention is clear: to use and enjoy Emacs, and spend our lives in this amazing environment.
While it's easy to ditch modern UI conveniences and pull technology like email, chat, database and server management, and editing book drafts into Emacs – well, these are tasks that have been implemented, for which there exist alternatives, and which you can teach Emacs to do in a similar way.
Oversimplifying: we can copy and tweak existing solutions and have a good life.
Now while everyone's email needs to use the same protocol, everyone's approach to thinking is different. There's no cookie cutter solution to merely rewrite in Emacs Lisp. We all need to figure out how to do this on our own, and then find an implementation that suits our needs. (Including using paper, but we're not talking about paper here.)
This is where I want to show you one simple foundational method to deep thinking, understanding, and problem solving: create yourself a Zettelkasten, an environment of linked notes that scales well over decades, so that you can take it with you into retirement and beyond for a lifelong journey of learning.
For this presentation, I merely assume that you agree that writing improves the quality and depth of thought. I also assume that you know how to type and move around in Emacs. The rest is just convention, and we'll walk through a couple of examples and exercises together so that after this talk, you're equipped with the simple tools that help you unlock new insights in your future.
About Christian
Christian is a macOS/iOS developer with a strong focus on user experience and clean architecture. Driven by a passion for accessibility and performance, Christian has shipped many apps and authored three technical books and 895+ blog posts, helping developers world-wide to realize their app ideas with a deep understand for the technologies they use. In 2013, Christian wrote about the Zettelkasten topic on his own personal blog and eventually moved everything over to https://zettelkasten.de where he and Sascha continue to teach and write.
Questions or comments? Please e-mail hi@christiantietze.de
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