Frank Carver: Whither Zettlr. The Zettlr project is ongoing, and the different views of the purpose of the application are causing tension when considering improvements, implementing new features and prioritising bug fixes. (See Hendrik Erz response further below.)

For the purposes of discussion I have identified a few different aspects of the nature of Zettlr

A Markdown Editor

If you first find Zettlr via the https://zettlr.com/ website, then it is natural to assume that this is the main purpose of the application

While Zettlr certainly fulfils this role, as it is able to edit markdown documents, it also offers more. The most obvious addition to the Markdown Editor role is the ability to manage one or more "workspaces", each of which contain many markdown documents. Zettlr also supports the addition of "yaml frontmatter" as a means of adding non-printable metadata to markdown documents.

Most competitors support some form of "real time" rendering of the rich-text equivalent of the markdown "source code", whereas Zettlr attempts a simpler in-line rendering. If a Zettlr user views Zettlr though the lens of a Markdown Editor, the lack of such a preview seems a strange omission

As a simple Markdown Editor, Zettlr takes a long time to load and manage workspaces of files, even if you only wish to edit a single file

A Personal Knowledge Manager (PKM)

the common features seem to be the ability to capture and interlink "nuggets" of information, knowledge, or opinion so that they may be found and used later.

This kind of application has several key attributes. One of them is a lack of "friction".

there are also some special types of knowledge manager which deserve discussion here

A Reference Manager

A Digital Zettelkasten

Zettlr mostly does the same job as a physical Zettelkasten, but in common with many computer implementations it lacks some of the ease of working with the cards

An Academic Writing Tool

Other Uses

'To Do List' and Project Management

Ebook Generator

Static Website Generator

Uses I don't know about

Ways of Working

Grouping and Separating Content

The unique feature of a workspace is that it can be added to or removed from the current working context.

Folders are a structural indication within a workspace

Some folders, however, are special, in that they are marked as being "projects".

All files within a project are considered to be part of a larger text

Tags are a non-hierarchical way of grouping and separating files

Grouping Conclusions

Identifying Content

Linking Content

Explicit Links

Implicit Links

Use of Internal Links

Tags vs Backlinks for Concept Groups

Linking Conclusions

Linking is a vital concept in Zettlr but it is inconsistently implemented, with different forms of linking being capable of different things

Searching, Finding and Filtering

Searching, finding and filtering conclusions

Filtering, searching and finding in Zettlr is functional at a basic level but is inconsistent. If improving "findability" is important, then changes could include:

Conclusions and Future Possibilities*

Future directions could include:

"Double Down" on one aspect

Provide more visibility of the different aspects

Split the application into separate tools

Split the application into "core" and "extension" components

Hendrik Erz: On the Future of Zettlr.

A few weeks ago, a debate broke out on the Zettlr Discord server on what Zettlr actually is, and what it isn’t

For many years, I have refrained from deepening the discussion too much, but the problems in not having a clear mission statement are mounting so much that they start to become real blockers in any progress with regard to the feature set.

Frank Carver has in this document outlined in a very detailed, analytic, and sorted way, what he perceives Zettlr to be, and what not to be.

This document is both a reply to Frank’s thoughts and an attempt to further his ideas

How it came to this

many non-strategic decisions I have made over the years, while the project gradually moved from a two-weeks semester break project to a full-fledged FOSS endeavour — without me knowing.

The initial intentions with Zettlr

my writing changed, but little. I still had the approach to extract one long reading note from the articles I’ve read, then add my own thoughts to these, and finally writing a document by keeping all those readings notes open which I needed and switching between everything. In its foundations, this approach has never changed to this day.

From Intentions to Development

From Development to Refactoring

While initially I had a clear target group in mind — academics specifically in the humanities — and even closed issues if I felt they were not in line with that goal, gradually I gave way to more and more diverse workflows, leading to what Zettlr is today.

Zettlr in 2022

To summarize, the development can be broadly divided into three phases.

All of this now culminates in a fourth phase, at whose beginning we now stand. This fourth phase will be characterized by a more strategic approach to the app.

What is now required is to streamline the feature set, throw out features that do not fit the mission of Zettlr, and add others that are still missing.

A Mission Statement for Zettlr

Let me spend the rest of this note on outlining the rudimentary, fundamental structure of this whitepaper-to-come.

1. Where is Zettlr now?

2. The Purpose of Zettlr

It should facilitate everything regarding writing in a serious manner.

we can divide those into two groups

The first group simply includes everything that facilitates writing, including note taking tools such as Obsidian, logseq, notable, OneNote, and Evernote; but also general writing tools such as Scrivener or Ulysses.

The second group then would only include those tools that are being used by an academic audience, i.e. Microsoft Word, Notion, and Scrivener.

So if you are a person that likes to write atomic notes and interlink quite a lot, Zettlr is probably not suited for you.

Then, on the other hand, the more serious writing tools like Scrivener and Ulysses have other things in common with Zettlr

but one thing that sets Zettlr apart from both (and which has been my goal since the very beginning) is interoperability

The benefits of Zettlr with regard to the second group are more pronounced, because Zettlr is aimed at an academic audience, so here we are talking less about the feature set and more about the workflows it enables.

3. The Target Audience for Zettlr

Target Group:
Undergraduate, Graduate, and Postgraduate students
Faculty (post-docs/profs)
Researchers in industry labs

4. What is Zettlr, and what is it not?

5. The Scope of Zettlr

Examples of non-text centric features Zettlr should incorporate:

Quo Vadis?

Don’t Double down: Be opiniated

One hill I will die on is that Zettlr should incorporate the features of several app into a single interface; and not go the Linux way of “one tool, one function”

Increase the Visibility of Features with a Strategic Vision

the app has now become so convoluted that it is sometimes hard to find features. I think we should definitely “clean up” the app so that most features will be easy to find

Increase Interoperability Instead of Splitting the App

For example there have been calls to implement “rendering plugins”

Conclusion

Let me finish this note off with another quote from the original white paper draft from two years ago, because I feel that this is still true for at least my personal vision of what Zettlr is, and is not:
The mission of Zettlr is
… to be an easy to use app for people who don’t code and don’t want to dissect their operating system just to get basic things working
… to include state-of-the-art methodology, hence it will never be “finished” as continuously new technology should be included as it gets popular
… be a “blank space” that does not force you too much into a certain workflow