Sascha Fast said that I should write up a blog post explaining why I find my association of notes through Git useful. Admittedly, I only use this kind of association rarely. When I do, however, it proves to be just what I need.

I tend to work on my notes in creative bursts during which my mind is deeply immersed in the material. While I am putting all the notes and citations from (e.g.) an article where they go, I’m also opening totally fresh topics and thinking about seemingly unrelated things. For example, thoughts about Socrates’s comments about the real self, the soul, and conversation in the Alcibiades, will make me think about something connected to Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel. When I’m done with a burst I commit in Git.

Most of the time, I navigate around my notes by either:

1. using the quick panel in Sublime because I know exactly where I want to go,
2. using direct links between explicitly associated notes, or
3. searching for words or citekeys because I know the general topic I am looking for.

But these ways of moving from one note to others will not capture the association between Socrates and Martin Buber—there is no citekey in the later note since the article I was reading had nothing to do with Martin Buber; there are no obvious key words to search between the two files; and the random inspiration during the burst did not cause me to explicitly associate the notes with a hard link. Nevertheless, a year later I start to see the deep pattern that initially led me to think of Martin Buber while reading about Socrates. When I had the original inspiration, my grasp of this underlying pattern was totally inchoate. But now, I’m starting to see many little ideas across years of reading form one big constellation. As I work on this, it is super helpful to pull up a list—in under ten keystrokes—of all the notes I edited when I was working on this particular sentence of my note on the Alcibiades.

Christian Tietze had this to say on Twitter:

Date-based IDs in the file name do the same but only upon creation—the tech hurdle for Git is high, though.

I wanted to point out that I think everyone should be using Git anyway if they are doing anything in plain text. With an appropriate plugin, there is really very little to learn (no need to get into the CLI or any advanced features for our purposes). I also want to point out that Christian is exactly right. With date-of-creation timestamps or date-of-modification timestamps, you only get one point at which to place this note near others. With Git, you get nearness based on each change—both to the starting note and to its “change neighbors.”