What Iām not saying is that your approach is somehow objectively incorrect, or that I disapprove of it, but from my experienceāand my first āpersonalā computer was PDP-11/23, although I also used IBM/370 for larger compute loads, when it was available, so itās likely that I have a lot of it simply by having hanged around computers for close to 45 yearsālearning a new thing by customising it is pregnant with the danger of destroying it, and only the thing alone by itself in the best case, or killing the learner at worst. This is especially true of kitchen nukers and acetylene welding torches: the former have voltages on the order of kilovolts that may fry anyone trying to learn it by disassembling and customizing instead of what theyāre built to fry, albeit in a different sense; the latter are prone to exploding horrifically, turning the learnerās house into a freshly acquired lot of land with absolutely nothing on it when customised too much during learning.
Letās step back to software, which is indeed safer but, just like everything else, no less prone to self-destruction from rough handling. Suppose a program has just 30 checkboxes as its option, and nothing else. Since there are 2Ā³ā°=1073741824 possible ways to configure this software. Thatās a little bit over one billion, by just about 74 million. Itās entirely unfeasible to expect that all this huge space of possibilities has been written a test for, as itās unreasonable to maintain a billion tests. It is reasonable, however, to assume that some of the possible ways to customise the software have never been not only properly tested but even tried.
I spent a week of evening torturing Bing Copilot to tell me everything about software that would solve my very real problems, and, after reading reviews of the options then researching every one to a certain depth, eliminated most of them. I then read more in-depth articles and short videos on each of the remaining ones and settled on logseq as the most promising option. Then I went through a beginners course, then two deeper ones, played with the program along before erasing the journals that I created. Then I started working with it with a journal called Scratch that I also subsequently removed. I customised the date format to YYYY-MM-DD, changed no more than 5 shortcuts, and installed 1 (one) plugin, namely Bullet Threading, because the default theme with its light-gray text and spiderwebāthin block lines in nearly invisible, even to my slightly myopic eyes. When I noticed that I often manually create pages and copying too many references, I dug through the Marketplace and found two more plugins that solved the actual problem, BlockāToāPage and enigmatically named logseq-swapblocks-plugin. This is where I am after first starting with logseq about 10 days ago. Everything is fast and smooth, although Iām sure I could slow it down to a crawl by installing every plugin from the Marketplace. Iām sure Iāll find a way to make it more readable, but this can wait, as the primary function, namely sorting my notes, cannot wait any longer. I donāt mind squinting at the text for a week and then figuring out how to do that later, come next weekend.
Iām just describing my experience; Iām not suggesting in any way that my careful approach is the best, or is somehow better than that of yours. I just wanted to share how I approached the new software with an unfamiliar workflow and also very complex, so any tricks that I may unwittingly try may backfire in an entirely unexpected way.
Good luck with logseq! To me, it looks like itās going to solve my problem by rescuing me from drowning in random paper and computer file notes. It certainly helps me already.
āCy