How do you encode "link sequences" and branching?

I agree, the concept of a folgezettel also acts as a forcing function to put new knowledge into an existing context, you have to think “how does this new piece of knowledge relate to what I already know”. This will help with remembering and also trigger associations.

This plugin gets you pretty close to ZK^3’s folgezettel feature, https://github.com/Dyldog/file-explorer-markdown-titles (or with slightly nicer file name rendering, but have to be installed manually, obsidian-md-title-sidecar). It’s not documented (for some reason), but it will create the same structure as ZK^3 based on the filename.

For instance, if you have these files

  • 1
  • 2
  • 1a1
  • 1a2
  • 1b1
  • 1a1a

and so on. They will be rendered with the “correct” indentation and order according to Luhmann’s system. This works nicely on macOS since it orders 1a10a after 1a9a (i.e. it respect numerical values). You can of course have more descriptive strings after the id in the file name. Two caveats that I see after 10 minutes of experimentation are

  1. You can’t collapse different levels
  2. Indention is proportional to number of consecutive branches, naturally, and will at some point be rendered off screen. I.e. 1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a will be indented a lot.

I would love to see this idea further developed. I don’t worry so much about where the folgezettel data lives, file name is fine. With alias support, linking won’t suffer that much, and with obsidian-md-title-sidecar I won’t have to see the ID in the file explorer. I’m going to experiment a bit with this over the weekend.

I see you’ve been active on this topic quite a lot, @lizardmenfromspace, but for others stumbling upon this, you might want to have a look at:

1 Like