Use case
I make regular use backlinks to organize the content of my work as a PhD student. I find it extremely helpful because:
- creating those associations between notes is
- easy and very quick
- relatively mistake-proof, since the user only has to type-in the existing note names
I would like to use the graph view in order to see the linked notes to a specific note together with the categories of notes.
What do I mean by “categories of notes”
This is highly user-dependent.
I frequently categorize my notes by simply adding them to specific folders. For example, I have a folders named “Phenomena”, “Methods”, etc.
Current limitation
The local graph only offers a way of distinguishing between the notes by means of creating groups and using different colors.
But this is both cumbersome and inadequate for use case I am presenting, because:
- One would have to create the group every time one opens the local graph view
- The coloring of the nodes is not a good enough solution for me, because when the graph is relatively large and there’s a large number of categories, using many colors is difficult to read
Proposed solution
It would be quite useful to have to ability to:
- Define categories of notes
- similar drill to how it is done already, using one or more of the following
- path
- filename
- tags
- similar drill to how it is done already, using one or more of the following
- Have some categories of notes as global categories, so that the user does not need to repeat the same task of defining the categories that they frequently use
- When the categories are defined, the nodes corresponding to the categories are either
- permanently enclosed by fluidic (in that they can move with the graph) colored shapes that carry the name of the category, or
- static shapes that “lock”/constrain the node movement inside them
An example of such a solution is shown in the image below
