Maybe a description of my notetaking practice will be useful to others. I don't know if this is strictly a "Zettelkasten" or not.<p>My note box for the last little while is Dercuano: <a href="http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano" rel="nofollow">http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano</a>. The notes are longer than a single index card (there are 882 notes averaging about 1300 words each), and they are hierarchically organized into sections and subsections. They often include links to other notes or other web pages, and they also have a chronological order and a set of tags. And I frequently grep them. I kept them in Git to keep them synchronized across different computers.<p>Typically a single note draws from many sources, and I tried to keep their contents in a readable order, which is easier to do on a computer where you can insert stuff in the middle. Some notes are one afternoon's thoughts, while others got added to and reorganized for years. So that's one way I make connections: I add hyperlinks, new data, explanations of how and why the entire rest of a note is wrong, new sources, etc. Another is that the process of writing a note involves bringing together different ideas, since few of the notes are just summaries of things others have written.<p>I learned a lot writing Dercuano, but in the end I was more frustrated than effective. I have a series of paper notebooks that are much less voluminous, only a few hundred pages a year, which are worse for text and hyperlinks, but much better for drawing, even things like schematics. Computers offer the potential of doing simulation, calculation, logic, optimization, rendering, data analysis, and data integration, the things that Engelbart and Kay envisioned in the 1960s. Yet Dercuano is stuck in the textual world without even transclusion or sketches. A much better medium is possible.<p>And we have lots of examples: spreadsheets, Jupyter notebooks, observable explanations in JS, diagrams in KSeg or GeoGebra, Observablehq and all of Bostock's previous excellent work. These show us that a better medium is achievable. But incorporating such a model into a note like the ones in Dercuano maybe requires some UI work. I mean the whole revolution of VisiCalc was that you could see the results of your calculation as you changed the calculation, and that doesn't really fit well into editing text files in Emacs.<p>Things like Darius Bacon's Doe and Halp do go some distance toward that integration for textual output. And R-Markdown integrates statistical analysis and data visualization with text, and Ward's Smallest Federated Wiki incorporates different media types on one page, including bytebeat. And I understand that org-mode SRC blocks offer the possibility of displaying image output inline. Still, none of these seem like they can scale to interactively doing a compass-and-straightedge construction or drawing a schematic for an analog circuit. Maybe I'm dismissing them too readily?<p>So I'm trying to figure out what this looks like in <a href="https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo</a>.