Dendron Weekly: 0.82 release, schema templates update, new Dendron user survey, repotting your docs, and more!
It’s time for a weekly roundup! The email newsletter is a curated collection of weekly updates about Dendron and the Dendron community!
Dendron 0.82 has sprouted 🌱
Smaller changelog this week as the team is working on some bigger architectural changes to increase the general stability and performance of Dendron (our focus for this month). More updates on those in upcoming releases!
Highlights
- enhance(schemas): Extend date subsitution to include week numbers with
CURRENT_WEEK(docs)
Everything Else
- fix(workspace): avoid workspace watcher crashing if folder is deleted
- fix(workspace): correct title generation of notes within sub-hierarchy starting with
md - fix(pod): acknowledge cli args for publish pod
Community
General Updates
What strategies do you use to maintain and take care of existing content in your digital gardens? We’ve added a new workflow all about how we prune and repot notes throughout our documentation: Pruning and Repotting
Starboard and TIL Highlights
These are highlights from the Dendron Discord
#starboardand#today-i-learnedchannels.
- 💡
seadudeshared a link to a timestamp showing off File Links from Note taking inside of VS Code: “GEM at this timestamp!”seadudealso shared: “You can develop projects (code, etc) AND have your Dendron vault as a companion just byFile/Add Folder to Workspace“ (Native Workspaces can be added to existing projects!)seadudealso shared a workflow tip on adding Tags to your code comments as a way to aid in Searching you notes and code files. For more information, a video example can be found in his Discord message.
- 💡
scriptautomateshared a link to GitHub announcing support for Mermaid Diagrams: “TIL that GitHub will now render Mermaid diagrams, like Dendron, right in your Markdown files!”
Dendron Reading Series
This week’s entry in the Dendron Reading Series.
Monica Powell explains how to build a second brain of knowledge you’ll use over and over.
PKM and TIL
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and “Second Brains” help us achieve the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) mantra. Monica talks about building a note taking habit, and mentions the TIL format as an example:
The “Today I Learned” (TIL) format of summarizing what you’ve learned in a few short sentences daily can be particularly helpful for folks who are committed to consistently taking notes in that particular format.
This format can be seen in Josh Branchaud’s til repository.
TIL can be a way to create daily notes outside of Daily Journal Notes, or even as an extension of them. Though Josh has his TIL published publicly, it could be helpful for your mind even if the notes stay as a private log of daily learnings.
Optimized for search
When it comes to optimizing notes for searchability, Monica talked about the importance of:
- Ease of search, including tagged and untagged notes
- Ease in creation of new notes
- Ability to always refactor, expand, and re-organize notes later
The Dendron approach to these:
- Ease in creation (with or without keybinding shortcuts)
- Lookup: Creating Notes
- Daily Journal Notes
- Task Notes
- Special Notes (scratch notes, etc.)
- Templates
- Making Your First Schema
- Ease of search
- Organizing and refactoring
External docs vs. recreating the wheel
Monica mentions how referencing out to external, official documentation for step-by-step guides can help save time, brain power, and your notes from becoming outdated. A fun extension to this, with Dendron, is in cases where the external notes have a Markdown source or are already a Dendron vault.
For example, instead of linking out to reference the Dendron documentation, users can follow the Seed Bank Quickstart to quickly add all of the Dendron wiki documentation to their workspace. This makes it easy to locally lookup official documentation, and even remix it with your private/local notes by using Note References and other features.
For Markdown notes in general, the Markdown Import Pod could be used to import projects like the Josh Branchaud’s til repository. Now you’ve augmented your knowledge with the knowledge from others!
Second “Command Line” Brain
The last piece touched on was about improving your CLI experience so that you aren’t needing to memorize long commands, or retype commands you have already done in the past. For this, Monica uses ZSH Autosuggestions to lean on the commands her past self has already learned.
Another CLI level-up could be TLDR, a community-managed tool that helps explain the most common usages of other CLI tools. Dendron happens to have the TLDR docs as a seed vault, too, so feel free to add that to your workspace for simple lookup!
Office Hours and New User Tuesdays
- Office Hours: Visit the Office Hours page for notes from previous sessions.
- YouTube Playlist
- Next: Wed, Feb 16, 9:00 AM - 9:30 AM PST
- New User Tuesdays: Visit the New User Tuesdays page for notes from previous sessions.
- Next: Tue, Feb 22, 8:30 AM - 9:00 AM PST
Thank You’s
A big thanks to the following gardeners that brought up issues, contributions, and fixes to this release :man_farmer: :woman_farmer: Visit Discord Roles for more information.
- Callum Mcdonald
@chmac#2931- #role.taxonomist
- update links in engine readme
- Patrick Yates
@opcon#7801 - Aleksey Rowan
@aleksey#5276 - Samuel Hobl
@nam#5364 - Carlos Cámara
@ccamara#5131 - Trevor Sullivan
@pcgeek86#5950
Dendron User Survey
A huge thanks to the following Dendronites that provided feedback in the 2022 Dendron User Survey. If you would like to help us improve Dendron, please checkout the survey (and earn a shiny Surveyor Discord badge in the process)!
- Tika
Tika#9526 - Thanos Lefteris
@alefteris#6114 - Vladimir Sanchez
@vladsanchez#1890 - Andrey Vorontsov
@Andrey Vorontsov#7892 - Paolo Dina
@pdina#0608 - Robb
@robb#2843 - Ryan Hill
@rlh1994#9754 - Bassmann
@Bassmann#5300 - Petew
@Petew#5507
As Always: Community Resources
- Join the Dendron Discord
- Register for Dendron Events on Luma
- Follow Dendron on Twitter
- Checkout Dendron on GitHub
- Read the Dendron Blog