Logseq Times 2023-04-22: Logseq 0.9.3, Task Management, Mobile Plugins Thoughts, Sample Graph and others

It feels like only yesterday that I was writing an introduction for Logseq Times, but here we have it; another week has flown by, which means we have another week's worth of content to review together.

Thank you to all that subscribe and read the weekly post; it is very much appreciated.  

As I write this, the mightly Fulham FC are about 2 minutes from getting back to winning ways. After 8, yes 8 minutes of stoppage time from nowhere.  Where we could certainly use a bit more time in the day is with Logseq. Let us see what happened this week.

Logseq News

• No news from the team this week, but if anything comes up, I will let you know.

Releases

Logseq 0.9.3 was released this week and included several bug fixes and other improvements.  Please reindex after updating to 0.9.3!

Features

• Add global scale level option to Whiteboards

Fixes

• Broken outliner structure when Backspace at the beginning
• Copy & paste problems
• Disable group-by-page when result-transform exists
• Insert properties will truncate other properties if there's any empty property
• Show marker when block text is empty
• Fix for graph parsing for CLIs
• config.edn & custom.css overwrite by syncing remote versions
• Logseq Sync keeps showing yellow badge and not syncing sometimes
• Incorrect position of mobile toolbar

Enhancement

• Persist block UUID upon external editing
• I18n: Update Spanish translations
• Advanced queries have a new :group-by-page? option

The latest release of Logseq can be downloaded here. For Android (Download the latest .apk) and for IOS, you can download or update Logseq from the AppStore.

Logseq In The Wild

Logseq for Task Management. Vivek has been using Logseq for Task Management over the past several months and thought to write a post about the features he uses:

Logseq for Task Management

Hello!, I’ve been using Logseq for Task Management for the past several months and thought I’d write…

DEV CommunityVivek Kodira

Bas @ToolsonTech extracted the basic components out of his workflow into a bare bones graph to help people get started with @logseq. Such a clever idea. You can use this as a type of template, guide to get started.

A very valid question and doubt:

I recently got Logseq and I noticed it serves more as a chronological diary, and less as a mix of personal knowledge base/wiki - which is what I've been looking for. Can it do the latter? Basically looking for Joplin contender.

Can Logseq be used to just randomly write down your ideas in a buffer space, and then later organise those ideas neatly into categories and kind of not forget what you wanted to do (i.e grade categories/ideas by rating/stars) whilst also keeping sure you don't write duplicates (I noticed I sometimes get two equal ideas over the span of 1 month, because I forgot about the 1st one which I wanted to do but I got flooded by 100 other ideas so I forgot).

The short answer is, yes, absolutely, it can. Check out the fuller responses here.

This post really caught my eye:

Transitioning to Logseq: I have finally decided to consolidate my workflow from Workflowy, Obsidian, iA, and Reminders into Logseq. Ever since discovering the project, I have eagerly awaited a stable release to make the transition.

You may recognize me as an active member within the Obsidian community. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm waned after the founders (who also serve as admins) censored my post addressing plugin vulnerabilities and deleted my subsequent posts sharing custom plugins and themes. These experiences have led me to appreciate Logseq's open-source nature even more.

However, after all that (and more),

So shortly after this post, I finished my theme and started to work on my plugin when I realized that plugin support is desktop only, and not only is mobile not planned yet but the developers want to limit mobile plugins to a library of their own creation (their reasoning is that it will help performance but this type of limitation is completely antithesis of open-source ideology)...

As a dev this is so strange: from my perspective, obsidian is closed source but the API to create plugins is far far more accessible (and actually available across all versions of Obsidian), they also allow the plugin to handle state so the markdown is much much cleaner, and can be used across other apps much easier (I cringed when I opened my logseq file in iA writer on mobile, the markdown was filled with state management crap)

... all this is a long way to say I'm moving back to obsidian + workflowy (for outlining and kanban).. I wanted to love logseq so much, but so many decisions made by the core development team are leaving me with a lot to be desired.

I hope some of these will get addressed and communicated by the Logseq Devs about the path they want to take regarding Mobile Plugins. I believe the plan is to make a standard library for plugins to make them a bit more standardised as opposed to being limited to selected plugins, but time will tell.

As a reminder:

Very interesting discussion between two users - one using Logseq for a while with another one trying to understand the folderless structure. Thanks Blogbourri and El Gonzo for the discussion.

I actually get the outline part of things, it's the content of each document I write on obsidian. The thing that I'm not quite getting is the absence of page and file structure. For me, each document is an outline, which Loqseq does very well, but each document lives in a hierarchical file structure, which, as far as I can tell, doesn't do at all.

I personally would find logseq without journals a fairly empty experience, but how you use the journal can vary. for example, a lot of people use the journal as an "inbox" and then move their blocks to pages once they want to permanently store that information. there is a lot of ways to peel an apple. Generally, though i'd just say don't worry about a system initially, just start taking notes and mess around with 1) journals 2) blocks and references 3) queries 4) pages (probably in that order imo)

As a reminder for anyone using Logseq Sync:

1. Do you still store your graph in iCloud? That’s a very big no no. The Sync manual repeatedly warns for this. When you use Logseq Sync with iCloud or Dropbox, those latter services can cause serious sync conflicts.
2. See this manual for instructions on ensuring only Logseq syncs your graph: https://blog.logseq.com/how-to-setup-and-use-logseq-sync/

Sorry for questions but when I write something in the journal tab, where does it go? I can't find it anywhere.

The answer is: In the folder that stores your graph, you’ll have four additional folders

• pages
• journals
• Logseq
• assets

Vertical Tabs like Obsidian Stacked Tabs in Logseq? Yes, this is possible through the use of the Tabs plugin

Is there a way to retrieve all broken block references? I sometimes break them without noticing. For example is it possible to create a query?

{:title "Broken references"
 :query [:find (pull ?b [*])
         :in $ ?matcher
         :where [(re-pattern ?matcher) ?regex]
                [?b :block/content ?c]
                [(re-find ?regex ?c)]
                [?b :block/refs ?br]
                [(missing? $ ?br :block/content)]
                [(missing? $ ?br :block/name)] ]
 :inputs ["\\([0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{12}\\)"]
 :table-view? false}

Thanks qwqpwp.

Longdown: Convert longform markdown files to outline format used by Logseq.

I've been using a text editor to write my notes as markdown files and rely on the headings structure to organize long notes.

However, when I tried to move my markdown files to Logseq, I faced a problem: the structure wasn't preserved which resulted in a loss of meaning.

This tool helps with the transition by converting existing longform markdown files to outline format that preserves the structure in a way that fits well for Logseq.

For a bit of fun. Thanks BenjiFrank for posting.

Logseq Feature Requests

You can check out the full list of Feature Requests here.

• Sticky In-Page Search Results - I’m searching through a page of notes for all mentions of “apples.” I get 11 hits. Then I go to the first hit, copy the block embed … and my search disappears. I have to re-do the search if I want to find the second hit, and the third hit, etc.
• Style Menu / Block Context Menu - the only way to edit the color of a block is by right-clicking on the dot. This is slow and easy to misclick. It would be great to have a ‘style’ section in the right sidebar that edits whichever block is currently selected. You could also have markdown buttons here as well
• Update existing linked references when shifting blocks - As a user, if I move a block somewhere else, I want all other blocks that link to it to update their link addresses automatically.
• Add source address/link for each block (add multiple links for a block)  - My workflow is to read slides and PDFs and write down my notes from the PDFs. For each note, I want to be able to add a source of where the note came from. After having notes, I will write down the insights and my thoughts on the notes I have written. In this case, I want the source of my insights to point to my notes.
• Display repo title in OS window titlebar - I have 3 Logseq repos in my computer. I use each of them for a different purpose. But switching between them is difficult because their titlebars don’t display their repo names. It would be nice if repo name is displayed in the window titlebar so we can know the repo before switching to a running Logseq instance.
• Improve query: Searching for [[page x]] should consider references to blocks inside this page - When searching for page links [[page x]], I would expect to find references to blocks inside thatpage x too. This is similar to inheritance concepts already provided by Logseq:
• Prompt user to confirm deleting block when an existing block reference is linked to the block - For blocks that contain a block reference linked to it, could we have LS prompt the user to confirm they want to delete the block? Currently its too easy to delete a block that contains at-least 1 block reference without realizing it.

Logseq Plugins

• logseq-plugin-sticky-popup - Plugin for showing selected text in a movable pop-up and positioning calendar.
• logseq-randomutils-plugin -  Check dictionary meanings of words using the @logseq-randomutils-plugin. Just highlight the word, and activate it using 'ctrl+m`. To open up a Google search, highlight the word and use 'ctrl+

• Kanban Board now supports advanced queries that return tasks (markers). README is updated.
  

Until Next Time

I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any comments or questions, please let me know.

Thanks again for reading.