The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. Samuel Morris spent his life searching for the perfect note-taking system, from leather-bound journals to digital tablets and voice recordings. He tried them all, but none satisfied his intangible desire for perfection. One day, he set it his desk, and he had an amazing Eureka moment. Can his beloved text editor become the tool he was so desperately searching for? It's fast, versatile, available, offline, easy to navigate, excels at text editing, yep, near them. Did you ever think of it as the go-to note-taking app? Meet the New York project, where you'll find installation tips, ideas, tricks, and more. It's important bit is the wiki. The wiki is a highly organized set of documentation for all your note-taking needs. I keep going back to it over and over, and I suggest that you do too, if New York is on your radar, at least all the core default modules, their documentation, different tips and tricks on how to use each of them, obviously the configuration parameters that you can add, and so much more. Here's the list of modules I'm currently testing, followed by a laser run, to install the plugin. New York is not a quick one to start. I don't think the number should deter you from using it, but it's worth mentioning. It's recommended to install tree sitter support for the new file spec, Norg, you'll need the GCC compiler for that, which, if you're on a Mac, there's a very high chance you're using an old one. In which case, a quick brew upgrade should do that trick, and then you can rerun the command. Let's go ahead and start the test.norg file. The first and foremost concept is the hierarchy of bullet points, or what you may know as title sizes from Markdown. Please behave a little bit different, and there's almost an infinite amount of indentation you can take one bullet. If a lower size bullet appears below a higher one, it belongs to it. It doesn't have to be a bullet, it can just be plain text, lists, or everything that comes in below the title will belong to it. Starting a higher level bullet will auto-indented to its natural place in the structure. Another feature of the hierarchy is that it's all ready to be folded. This makes work very easy when editing large lists. If that's your style, there are many benefits to working like that, but this is a little bit out of scope right now, so I'll move on. One of the key concepts of any note-taking system is the ability to link notes to one another. This is not only good for organization. If you're following the Zettelkasten system, or getting things done, or para, all topics I recommend you Google, there's a high chance you'd want to create many types of links to help you easily find notes in a manner that makes sense not only based on hierarchy, but also based on context. Links in nord files are enclosed in curly brackets. If a link points to a file, you surround it again with columns, but links can also point to a bullet point of any order, in which case it will only be preceded by a hash. If you've just noticed, I linked to a non-existing file, and then by pressing enter, I was taken to a new file by that name that I started immediately editing. This is a nice little feature that helps a lot with the intuitiveness of the system. Here's an example for a bullet link, which as you can see, Nierg will do its best at interpreting the closest match to the name in your link. Since links are great out when presented, and the names are not always easy to read as text, especially not as part of a fluent text. You can do what is also familiar from markdown, and change the title link to any text you like, which will follow the link, and enclose in swear brackets. Once ready, it'll appear as a sort of a link you can click, only by obviously pressing enter. LeaderNN is short for new note, and a small pop-up lets you input a name, which you can then start immediately editing. I personally prefer the linking method, but this is a cool feature to have wherever you are. Nierg has the concept of workspaces, these are configured in your plugin Lua config, and then lets you run Nierg workspaces' name to quickly open an index file for that workspace. This is useful if you have global notebooks that are not bound to a specific location like a code-based project. An important visual component Nierg has is the concealer. This can be toggled on and off to show you the real interpretation behind visual representation of all Nierg fonts. In denting bullets of any order, we'll automatically change their representation. This is the equivalent of tab and shift tab in other editors. Another super useful concept is action lists. You can call them to do lists, action items, whatever works for you. What this provide is a nice concept of having to-do items done, urgent, cancel, recording, and many, many, many more. A nice handy default mapping is leaderTD stands for to-do done, and leader TU, which stands for to-do undone. These can help you run the mapping instead of, you know, changing the characters themselves. Another nice thing about lists is that there are smart. If a bullet title is marked as a to-do item, and all of this subset list of items is completed, it will be marked as done. This also works vice versa. If you cancel one of the items, the topic changes to either pending or undone. You may have been wondering how we've gotten so far without ever talking about metadata. You know, timestamps, authors, categories, and everything else that makes a real note-taking system stick. Well, New York has a command for that as well. By running New York inject metadata, I get the metadata on top, which is surrounded by at document.mita, and the at end site. The description is something I can change for my benefit. I have timestamps for when the note was created, updated, and diversion, if that makes sense. By adding categories, I make sure that later on, when we create a workspace index, my notes will be categorized based on these inputs. Lastly, before we move on, you can create with New York a table of context. That kind of creates a map of a given note, especially for large documents. It creates a map of links that help you navigate through any set of notes within a given file. In many cases, it makes sense to just create project-related notes rather than a full-blown workspace. Not like Markdown dedicated files, or the wiki part of a git repo, if you're familiar with that. In this case, I work by convention, creating the notes there, and adding an index.norg file. These can be added to the git ignore, or better yet, committed into the repo, and then integrate it into your source control workflow. If the situation allows it, that's what I tried it once ready, or occasionally run the generate workspace summary command to create categorize lists of linked notes. I'm using the index file, but it's basically available to you anywhere. One modem adding here, and I tend to use daily, is the journal. Journaling is a great thing to do if this is a habit you're trying to build or maintain. Essentially, what New York does is to provide you with an interface to tap into daily, and write a note in a journal, which will then be held under a directory structure of year-slash month slash day. You can also add entries for yesterday or tomorrow to reduce the friction of moving files around. This may be great for reminding there is meeting notes or anything that's strongly bound with the date it's taken. You can kind of get the same result, at least for the date-based stuff with metadata, but having a structure that's based on dates makes the process of locating a piece of information far more easier. If you head over to New York specs, you can find a robust and complete Norg spec that lays out the full list of options. This video is way too short to cover it, and I doubt that anyone will sit and actually skim through the entire thing, but rest assured almost anything you're trying to build as far as notes go is packed in there. Quote, separator is obviously underlining, bolding, or writing italic text, as well as endless indented nested list items numbered lists come with the same functionality, which is actually even cooler visibly. Quotes can also be nested as you can see. Additionally, if you're writing an essay or something that requires footnotes near got you covered, there are a few kinds of them, single or multi-line, and they're marked so that you can easily separate and find them. A highly sought after feature of engineering notes is the highlighted syntax code snippets. New York handles this with the code tag, ad tag, and the supported language name. Most of them are already supported, I can tell you that. Over to the exporter. Generally speaking, there's no need to explicitly configure markdown, but just add the expert module to the New York configuration. Once ready, the expert command will be available to you through colon New York, and it goes like so. New York export, then you add to file to create a single file, and the name of the file. If you add dot MD, the file format will be auto interpreted as markdown, so you don't have to do anything. And there it is. The exported markdown file is now on the right hand side, which you can then use to your liking, whether as a markdown server, on another note taking up, the Git repo, etc. There are additional exporters that I won't cover here, but definitely check them out over at the New York wiki. So as I can see, New York is packed with goodies. It's already integrated into my daily routine of note taking. I'm going to expand on that maybe in a future video, but I love the way that it integrates with new VIM and the fact that it allows me to write my notes as any other text that I do on my daily routine with any of them is just a game changer for me. There's one point, however, where specifically obsidian takes the precedence here, the ability to edit things through the mobile device. Having something this close to my fingertips daily, if I'm not at my desk and I want to register something that I've just listened to on a podcast on an audio book or just read, having that through the mobile phone takes the entire thing to the next level. I'm still kind of fighting my way through understanding how I can achieve the same with New York because I really, really like the structure and the idea of how it works and integrates with my offline structure and everything you've seen in this video. If I find something relevant, I'll update. Lastly, if you still don't understand why I'm so keen on writing every text I can with VIM and why I like it so much, especially the text editing abilities of it, please catch the list of new VIM videos I already have in my channel. Thank you for watching this far and I will see you on the next video.
