Oh… It’s you… It’s been a long time, how have you been? Yes it’s me and a real shocker: I’m still alive.

I lately started using a new note-taking app called Logseq and I think that it’s worth to mention it here.

What does Logseq mean?⌗

I have no idea to be honest. But I know that it stands for a powerful note-taking software that transfered the way I do my coledge notes. It’s what I’ve been waiting for a long time. You’ve probably heard of obsidian, a non-open-source markdown editor with many useful plugins and a real ton of plugins. It looks great, but I’m not really into installing proprietary software that I have FOSS alternative to.

And I did not have anything with such capabilities for a long time. That’s why I used Nextcloud notes, LaTeX and some other apps that I was using all at the same time as there was something always… missing.

It can do it all⌗

Referencing heaven⌗

Did you ever need to easily reference something? Like a presentation or a source with aditional information? You can do that! You can add a PDF to your document and open it so that half of the window is the PDF and the other one are your notes. It’s very powerful since you can easily take “screenshots” from the pdf, copy text, etc and add it as a reference to your notes, so that when you click the image/text it will open the PDF at the right place.

You can even get plugins to reference youtube and local videos at a specific time! I haven’t tried that feature, yet, as I don’t really have video materials that I could take advantage of.

Math and physics equation are pain in Markdown⌗

but not in Logseq! I was so relieved that I could take the best from both worlds. Easily structuring text in Markdown while having the power of LaTeX when I need to write something with complicated formatting. If I need to wite an equation I’ll do just $$<equation_here>$$ and I’m done! Just like that you can wite $$v = \frac{s}{t}$$ and you have yourself a nice equation.

But there are limitations. You can’t really use environments and other stuff as it’s a basic feature set which cannot import packages. But still it’s better than not having it and I use the feature heavily.

Later, now, DONE!⌗

Aaand he’s talking so fast that I cannot write both what he’s talking about and what’s in the presentation. But I can just write the headding of what I need to finish, press CTRL+Enter and bam, LATER. Once I’m at home with some time ti finish my notes, I click a button and see all my unfinished stuff. So I press CTRL+Enter again, on the unfinished chapter, and Logseq now tracks my time that it took me to finish. CTRL+Enter for the last time and it’s DONE!

You can also use /schedule to, well, schedule your work on a specific thing. Sadly it doesn’t sync with calendars, Logseq has it’s own. So unless you’ll be looking into the Logseq’s calendar often I recommend adding it to your regular calendar as well.

Admotions, because bold sometimes isn’t enough⌗

There comes a time where you want to write a note, or something importand, etc. Only if there was a nice way, that could diferenciate it from the rest of the text.

Well admotions are a thing and, of course, Logseq supports them! It’s quite a nice way to make sure you won’t miss the note about the thing that the said will 100% be in the exam. Or to just mark some random thing you don’t need to know but still is a nice fun fact. I wish I remembered to make more use of it as it’s something not many editors support but really helps the readability of the notes.

Plug-in everything!⌗

Missing some features? Go into the plugin store! There’s about 200 plugins right now and they can do a lot. A nicer dark mode, banners at the top of pages, pomodoro timers, nicer links, vim keybinds, and many more are available out of the box. There’s even one for GPT3 that can help you with writing, but that takes some setup as you’ll have to get yourself an API key from OpenAI (it’s free).

The elephant in the room⌗

The thing is that it’s not fully compatible with Markdown. Exporting everything to another program won’t be as easy as opening a .md file in Kate for example. It uses it’s own layout which is called blocks, pages and graphs. It’s confusing at first, as this layout isn’t really used anywhere else, but you’ll get used to it.

It goes like this:

graphs
└── pages
    └── blocks

Graphs⌗

Graphs are collections of pages. It’s called graph, because it shows references between the pages. You can imagine graph as the folder and pages as the files. The complicated thing is that pages can “act” as a folder as well, but we’ll talk about this later.

Graps allow you a pecial view that chows pages as nodes connected by references. That’s really useful for researches and stuff like that, as it shows you what supports which fact, but it’s quite confusing if you don’t make use of that feature.

Pages⌗

Pages are represented as a markdown file in the filesystem (graph folder). If you take the file only, and open it in other application, you’ll loose out on the references, especially if you move the file away from it’s place.

The best way to stucture your notes so far, that I know of, looks like this (this is text in the pages):

[[page-name]]
├── [[sub-page-1]]
├── [[sub-page-2]]
└── [[sub-page-3]]
    └── [[sub-sub-page]]

Writinq [[page-name]] creates a new page with the specified name. With this you can have a page of pages and organize them like that.

I for example have a page (in my school graph) where I have the school years, in a school year page I have the semester, in the semester page I have the subjects and in the subjects I have the notes``

[[2022/2023]]
└── [[Summer]]
    ├── [[IZP]]
    ├── [[ISU]]
    └── [[...]]

It’s a bit compilcated to get used to, but in the end it’s not that bad.

Blocks⌗

There are some issues with blocks. It’s not as if you’re writing normal markdown. Think of it like this: everything is an unordered list. Every list item is it’s own block that you can edit. Logseq also does not support ordered listst out of the box, you’ll have to install a plugin for that. Then once you want to order something it’ll look like this:

- The followin is an odrdered list: #.ol
  1. First
  2. Second
  3. ...

You’ll have to add #.ol tag and every subitem will than have it’s number. It works pretty well, but I’ve been a bit confused until a friend told me how to do it.

The mobile app⌗

is a nice adition. While it lacks some features, mostly references, it’s really useful to be able to read you notes while on the go.

But how do you get your notes between pc and to your pohone?⌗

PCs are easy. Just sync it with your favorite cloud solution. If you’re using Nextcloud though, prepare for some trouble on the phone’s side. While the Nextcloud’s mobile app has a functionality called sync, it does not sync folders. It will download all the changes from the server, but once you modify a file on the phone, it won’t upload the changes back to the server. I’ts ok as long as you’re fine with read-only notes on the phone, but it’s terrible, if you want to add something on the go.

So what’s the solution? You can use syncthings to move stuff around, but didn’t want to bother as Logseq has it’s own sync solution. Yes, it’s paid, I know. It costs 5$ a month but you’ll be supporting a great FOSS project that definetly deservers the monthly fee for the dev work and uptime cost for sync.

Also, it’s encrypted. Once you pay the project on open-collective and create an acoount on their website you’ll be able to password lock your graph (encrypt), so that they can’t see what you’re writing, and then on the other device you choose which graph to sync. It even syncs all the assets so that the references are still working on the other device. You won’t see them on the phone, but the sync feature is available there as well.

It can do much more⌗

I just skimmed the surface of all the Logseq’s available functions. There’s many more / commands, admotions and plugins. But even just what I wrote now the article is quite too long to read so if you want to know more, take a look yourself, I konw you’ll discover some nice functionality that I missed.

Just messing aroud with the program pays off as once you’ll learn one thing another one will apear.

In the end I learned to love the app⌗

it’s just so much easier to take notes in lessons as you can download the same presentation your professor has (we have them available in the schoool’s moodle) and just write some important things while referencing the stuff that’s in the presentation so you don’t have to write everything down. When you couldn’t be sat enough to write something, you just press CTRL+Enter and you have it marked as later. You can then go over the unfinished stuff ater school and catch up. Then you can just go over the notes click on what you don’t understand and there you have the presentation with more info. It’s a really nice workflow that I didn’t know I needed.