Sequential navigation with next / previous page (for zettelkasten / documentation)

Feedback Feature Requests
1

description of the feature request:

similar to the journal pages where you can browse entries in sequential order, I would love a way to browse pages sequentially, either with infinite scrolling (like journals) or via next / previous buttons (inside a breadcrumb as in mkdocs or at the bottom of a page content as in a docusaurus website).

As opposed to manually linking to another page inside the page contents or via the file header, the system would automatically pull the next/previous pages to display based on a sorting list.

This sorting list could be :

  • an auto-generated alphanum sorted list of all pages (eg: user has a zettelkasten with ids or is using dewey decimal system / johnny decimal system), so 0001-intro.md > 0002-specs.md etc…
  • user-defined via a file listing the reference pages in any order
    • this could be extracted from the existing contents file
    • by parsing a .md file with a specific page-tag ? (eg. a bit similar to Tiddlywiki’s system tags) or using an external json/csv/plain-text file

use-cases :

  • any type of multi-page documents where sequential order is important (book, screenwriting, articles, documentation)
  • zettelkasten where articles of similar interest are arranged sequentially by id so you can browse disregarding the explicit linking, but rather by browsing the topical sequence
  • a repo where everything is sorted by date like the journals page, but with extra info in the title : eg : could be a movie database with 1977 - star wars.md, 1981 - blade runner, … or historical events 1905 - Einstein’s theory of special relativity published.mad, 1918 - End of the First World War.md, etc
  • this could be a suitable replacement for long bullet lists (in dynalist, I used to put everything inside a single super long document to be able to browse topics in sequential order)

benefits :

  • bi-directionnal linking is great to provide flexibility in the way we connect topics, but the classic sequential order of books is also a natural way to create connection, which is currently missing in a lot of modern notetaking apps unless the user actively (manually) creates links inside content.
  • in case of a zettelkasten or a documentation repo, the user could add a new page and tweak the sorting list without having to manually edit the content of each page of the repo to update the links.

examples :

  • a personnal docusaurus blog with next/previous pagination at the bottom of each page :
    https://wiki-power.com
  • mkdocs’ top navigation bar
    MkDocs
2

bumping this request to add more thoughts :

  • I wonder if it’s possible to re-purpose journals to auto-fetch a custom list of files (not as a replacement for journals but rather as new featureµ/section) ?

    • istead of fetching journal pages, it would fetch files from another folder in alphanum order (that would require user to name files i nsequential order) or even better, based on the content of a file like contents.md (so first link gets fetched, then it parses the file for the next link and auto fetch it, etc…) ?

  • the right sidebar has a stacking behavior : pages opened in the sidebar are stacked, so it creates a history of recent files. (similar to tiddlywiki’s story river)

    • it’s already possible to populate the right sidebar using the config.edn, so one could have sequential files in the right sidebar.
    • is the stacking behavior also desirable in the main pane ?
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