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Weekly Update

Logseq Times 2023-01-08: Upcoming Fixes and Features, API, Config Feature Requests, Plugins

Latest updates from the Logseq community including Upcoming Fixes and Features, API, Config Feature Requests, Plugins

Logseq Times 2023-01-08: Upcoming Fixes and Features, API, Config Feature Requests, Plugins

With the New Year comes a new beginning, so in 2023, I want to present you Logseqtimes.com. The unofficial home for news, updates and opinions from the world of Logseq.

After some complications in renewing logseqweekly, I have fired up the old typewriter and got the process going.

This time around I will be using Ghost instead of WordPress to publish content. The intention is to post more content while still offering you a weekly digest of what has been going on in the world of Logseq.

I am hoping you will join me on this journey.

Releases

To start the year fresh, the latest release of Logseq is 0.8.15, which can be downloaded here.

In the upcoming releases of Logseq, we have the following to look forward to (thanks to my good friend Bader for sharing);

Enhancements

Fixes

New features

Logseq News / Events

  • @barrelltech has been added to the dev team. Welcome! The Logseq team now comprises 10 people. Congratulations!
  • @cnjunyi demonstrates a potential future Logseq feature.  

Logseq Mobile

As a reminder, Logseq does indeed have a mobile app. To access the mobile apps, please use the respective link for your OS below.

Logseq In The Wild

This week (6 January 2023) I chatted with Tienson to catch up on Logseq and try and get him to spill some beans about what is in store for us in 2023.

After a bit of arm-twisting, I was able to get some information out of him. You can check out the blog post here.

For those with a Medium subscription and would be kind enough to read it there, link.

I recently posted a blog post on the apps I will use in 2023. The intention is to buckle down with a few apps that enable me to get what I want done. Enough of continuously trying out other apps, always looking at what other apps have available 2023 is the year to get things done.

Again, for those with a Medium subscription and would be kind enough to read it there, link.

Bader is leading a revolution to make Logseq issues much more manageable for everyone involved. Going forwards we should hopefully see the issue count reduce which will allow for a type of clean slate start. This should allow the devs to see the bugs and issues users are reporting and for fixes to be implemented.

In light of the above, there was some talk concerning the distinction between a bug and a feature. Danzu provides us his view of the differences.

Bader has also worked on a refreshed and polished GitHub readme page. This should be live soon. (full page available here)

@rrampp asks about subjective topics or the non-hard science where interpretations are required and you want to link ideas together. If I am creating a block around a new concept, what are some of the ways of finding other blocks that relate to the same idea? I could search for pages but I really should be searching for blocks.

In this case, you could use the linked and unlinked references section in Logseq. You could also return the results using a query, so something like {{query (or "intelligance" "intelligent")}} anywhere in your graph to return instances of intelligence or intelligent.

Danzu provides us with some tips on using namespaces:

Namespace was built to serve both content disambiguation and categorization/hierarchy, according to the change log. For categorization, I use it to group content related to work. Because I find it easier to use one vault for both work and personal, and have to extract the namespace for work in the future if I switch a workplace.

Few suggestions regarding the use of namespace

  • Limit the depth to 3, if possible
  • use alias on frequently use namespaces

Finn1sher asks: What are people's methods for taking notes surrounding one topic, in a way that feels coherent and recoverable?

This brings up the old:

  • Everything on the journal page
  • One page for the topic and pages for subtopics
  • One page for the topic and indentation for subtopics.

Interested in reading what works for you.

For those that want to use Logseq Sync.  You need to become a Backer (USD 5 / month) by donating through OpenCollective.

Once you have donated, you will receive an email - please make sure you read this and follow the steps detailed in the content. Once you have submitted the form included in the email, wait 1 hour or so for authentication. You can now log in via Logseq to activate Sync. Full steps are included here.

Using the Logseq API and Make.com to hook it and Notion together.

There is a lot of hidden functionality in Logseq and the config.edn file. To see the most up-to-date version, please check out https://github.com/logseq/logseq/blob/master/templates/config.edn

From here, I usually scan to see what is new and copy it to my config.edn file. Avoid copying and pasting the whole thing as it will overwrite your preferences.

It would be great if the config.edn was updated automatically with new releases but this is not possible yet.

There was a very interesting discussion between nmartin and AlexL about the structure of Logseq, pages, blocks, aliases and everything in between. Definitely worth a read (follow this link and scroll down).

Luhmann summarised the main points for us, mere mortals:

  1. Logseq needs to add things like block IDs and time stamps to each block in its internal database in order to keep track of everything. Let's call this stuff "internal metadata."
  2. This is "internal" metadata because if it was all written to MD the MD files would become cluttered and unreadable.
  3. So we have a tension between more robust metadata and more readable files.
  4. I get the sense that there are also some questions about how frequently the system updates the file in terms of speed and reliability.
  5. There are also questions about using one file or multiple files.
  6. EDN helps solves many of these problems because the data is more structured and it more closely represents the data as stored in the internal DB.

Confused? I was too, but after a couple of readings, it made sense and also helped me understand Logseq's structure.

For those that use / used ZoteroRoam be sure to check out the Logseq Citation Manager plugin by Sawhney.

Some visual thinking in Logseq perhaps?

Whiteboards by cnjunyi

Images posted by cnjunyi

Want to make a progress bar in Logseq - check this out

Danzu provides us with a great graphic of Logseq's features:

image by @Danzu

Logseq Feature Requests

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

  • ​Better (human-readable) asset name - for example: Use page name as the prefix of asset name or let the user specify an asset name (a little inconvenient though). An alternative is to support renaming an asset easily.
  • Gallery view for query results - It would be nice to have a gallery view for queries that have images associated with them. For instance, books or films with cover/poster images, or contacts, etc.
  • Option to treat specific blocks as pages - Problem - When trying to figure out if something must be a block or a page, the difference is: A block is placed in a context and in the outliner hierarchical structure and so it is great to organize stuff. But since they are not in the graph you would lose important connections (references in the block, in its children or its path).  A page will be a node in the graph and every reference in it will be a connection. But a page is just a “root block” so you will lose the structure above. Solution - Provide a way to display certain blocks in the graph as nodes and the references¹ as connections. A way to trigger this could be to treat title:: property of blocks as special property: if present the block will be displayed in the graph with that title.
  • Wildcard functionality for linked references, unlinked references & hierarchy - Wildcard functionality of some sort would increase Logseq’s knowledge connecting abilities. expand-linking-matches so that Logseq searches for words that have a partial match, for example, the page “Darwin” would connect with pages that mentioned the word “Darwinism”.
  • Some suggestions on task management for logseq - The deadline and schedule date of a task can be consistent with the block properties at the UI level. Redesign of cyclic tasks.
  • Option to export pages or whole namespaces including assets - I recently decided to migrate parts of my main graph to a dedicated one so that I can share the contents. Afaik currently it’s not possible to have an easy migration that includes assets. My main graph has ~2000 assets and I’d have to write a script to parse the markdown files to extract the screenshots I embedded. I think it would be nice to have an export page or export namespace option, which also extracts file assets that are linked or embedded from the page you’re trying to export.

Logseq Plugins

  • Omnivore (read-it-later app) - We just released version 0.10.0 of the logseq-omnivore plugin. This version will import labels (tags) set on individual highlights. I find this quite useful when reading an article that covers many topics, tagging the highlight gives me a much more useful graph than tagging the entire article. One other neat trick is you can tag your highlights with #card and it will be added to your Logseq flashcards. https://github.com/omnivore-app/logseq-omnivore
  • Smart Typing updated: - Clipboard reading built-in function - User defined functions More detailed documentation and demonstration screencasts are in the README. https://github.com/sethyuan/logseq-plugin-smart-typing
  • Logseq Anki Sync V4.2.0 Released - #card-group (turns all children of tagged block to cards) - rendering in extra prop, pdf fixes - performance improvements & bug fixes https://github.com/debanjandhar12/logseq-anki-sync (edited)
  • LogLink - LogLink allows you to send text (including TODOs, [[links]] and #tags), urls, locations and images to your Logseq graph from mobile apps. It is free and open source.

Until Next Time

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

Thanks again for reading.

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