Hmm, I havenāt heard of Hepta before. It looks interesting. It looks like it is taking some notes from Obsidian as far as the style/theme and offline access. Iād be curious to hear what worked/didnāt work for you with it.
could there be some version of what youve made to create/populate the canvases by tag more open ended- like running the code/script just changing a target tag and such?
Yeah for sure. Having played a bit more with the Obsidian plugin API I think this would also be an easy plugin to make. One of my existing ideas is to make a sort of external interface to query and combine tags and stuff, and that could then generate and open the canvas or other outputs (a āqueryā note with a bunch of embeds?) it generates in Obsidian. Iāll let you know when/if I pick this up againā¦
heck, ive pretty much ditched page views and write directly on canvas, i barely use tabs now- ive been making canvases called desks, as temporary, and if any becomes cohesive i rename then, its awesomeā¦ And while the canvas is great for plotting things, thinking, manually making relationsā¦ its all manual
Thatās interesting to hear and makes me want to try writing directly into canvases again.
My recent tricks are using a bunch of tab rows and using this rofi tab switcher from my desktop (although needed less since switching to mulitple tab rows).
Also do you think the novelty of your new method will wear off and need to pivot to a different method in some time? Thatās a definite ADHD thing, and also worth expecting and accommodating that pivot. Iām sure it will keep happening for me, and Iām trying to work with it.
Whenever Iāve tried writing directly on canvas, it hasnāt stuck for me. I kind of end up falling back to just pen & paper to have more freedom. But Iāve also thought about if thereās a workflow where I can use a printer & my scansnap scanner to sketch & mark stuff up, and get it in and out of obsidian quickly. I got to playing around with pdfs in canvas, and found it looked and felt better with the pdf exploded into individual pages shown side by side in a grid as images (get rid of the annoying pdf viewer widget, and page scrolling, also the pages rendered crisper this way as images at different zoom levels).
Hereās an example of dumping a stack of scanned pages as images side by side, with little boxes for additional notes below:
Other issues preventing me from spending more time living in the canvas:
- It canāt remember the scroll position of long notes. So I feel like I need to re-do everything as super atomic notes with no scrollbars (which is also something Iām thinking ofā¦ like just make every note a ātweetā right?)
- No render of nested canvases. It feels like it would be much more powerful if we could view and interact with nested canvases, similar to embedded notesā¦ Maybe I will spin this comment into itās own feature request
I still struggle with obsidian having no way of seeing notes in some sort of overview- but unlike the graph showing the contents. Some grid/thumbnail view filterableā¦
Yeah Iām with you on wanting some way of āseeing everything at onceā, or some kind of summary. I also like the idea of injecting randomness into the process like having a slideshow of specific notes/tags always on, so something might pop up and catch your eye. Actually one of the ways Iāve done something similar with all that twitter data from gallery-dl is to have a spare screen showing a shuffled video slideshow, playing loops of all the .mp4 files in a grid. That has been helpful/inspiring. I can see taking it further to making a sort of slideshow of the full tweets (that could done in a few ways, using the extracted markdown, or using screenshots of tweets, orā¦ hmm feeding a āplaylistā of tweet URLs to a chromium driver that will periodically go to a new random URL (e.g. with selenium or debug mode))