Logseq has an excalidraw feature which allows you to draw freeflow. I think it would be great to implement excalidraw into rems (just like what was done with images) that you can draw on and take handwritten notes.
Agree.
And for people on desktop working (offline/local-only), this should be saved locally.
(As should any image that is included/pasted in a Rem)
Ideally images should be stored (as images) in a local folder using some sort of sane naming/structure.
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Roam, Athens Research and others have added the ability to embed Excalidraw drawings within a bullet. It works really well and would be great to have in RemNote.
Itâs a rather quiet saturday afternoon here and so I just want to take the chance to share some of my thoughts and insights here.
So, right away into it: For really creative work, creating all new ideas and finding solutions, you have to see the BIG PICTURE. In order to achieve that youâll have to draw in bold strokes.
I just want to give an example from medicine. You have your patient with headaches laying in front of you. As you check things, you find high blood pressure. Simple thing, prescribe some medication, schedule a checkup to see then what it does. You right now canât come up with an explanation, what causes the hypertonia, so thatâs strange. But well, you do what youâve learnt step by step.
Only by seeing the BIG PICTURE and having in mind how things are connected, youâd get the idea to just order a quick kidney sonography to check. And tadaaa, you found where the hypertonia comes from. Thereâs something really and definitely not okay down there. By treating this you solve the root cause, can spare the (useless) antihypertonic medication and the patientâs health can be set back to okay fully - which it otherwise wouldnât.
In case A you just ran your standard-program. You have your little list in your head with step 1, step 2, step 3 that you know very well have sleeping and can simply execute. Youâve learnt it well.
In case B you look at your patient to see whatâs going on and keep in mind how things are connected in the body and how processes work. And looking at the problem this way, you find other points you can check, to nail down whats really going on there.
You can be a reasonably okay doctor with thinking in small facts - but you can never be a really good doctor when you are not able to see the big picture.
The above example is even a very much real-life one - renal hypertonia (high blood pressure caused by kidney problems, to keep it simple) is known, but it gets very often neglected, people donât have it in mind cause itâs just a little âoutside the boxâ of the usual treatment schemes and rather rare (around 2 % of hypertonia altogether) and for most time almost completely asymptomatic, nevertheless often evere.
Another example is: youâre worried about the permanently raising cancer rates and want to find a solution to prevent cancerous diseases better - also for yourself. Knowing all about cancer in tiny detail doesnât help you so much here - you just need the most severe contributing factors, like exposition to hamrful substances in many areas, but also quite a number of lifestyle connected things. As for the genetic disposition, youâd have to look into the new field of epigenetics a bit more to gain some understanding based on what we know yet.
The solution to find and propose a low-cancer-risk lifestyle will come from thoroughly thinking through those big points one after another and connect, what you find.
Same applies if you want to find a solution for making some sensibly really working greener traffic, find ways to reduce the emitted CO2 in certain areas and everything else like that. Or when someone wants you to answer the question if one can get rhabdomyolysis just from going to the gym and few days later die from it. (Thinking it through the answer is yes, in rare cases this could be possible even for healthy and young people, and by viewing the big picture of rhabdomyolysis you can determine clearly what factors would lead to it. You have to figure out fully yourself though, cause thereâs no real standard answer).
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This is where RemNote has itâs shortcomings by now. Splitting things down to the most atomic little facts is the very best you can do for your memory retention - and the fastet way to get huge bulks of knowledge in and still retain some reasonable understanding.
But on the other hand you also have to train connecting the dots and train your âbig-picture-brainâ. That ability doesnât come just by itself, but only through constant practice, i. e. USING your big-picture-brain.
I luckily have all of my education behind me already for a good while. Thinking about it lately I realized, I had done the biggest part of my learning by concept maps back then.
Back in the beginning 90s when PCs were just some basically unusable thing for anything serious, mindmaps and concept maps were explored very thoroughly also in regard of memory retention. Most of the results, what enhances retention have been forgotten meanwhile or get ignored (one color only, small sheets of DIN A6, roughly 6" x 4" postcard size in English, cause you have to see them all in one glance, strictly no boxes, handwriting but no cursive, only as much line connections as you may need, no arrows, just lines).
I remember myself carrying around a huge pile of self drawn concept maps with me all the time and just kept looking at them trying to actively re-think and reflect the connections and facts on them. That way has brought me through all of my study time (medicine) without using anything else much (apart from reading a lot) and got me pretty good grades. I remember I used flashcards (the paper version) almost not at all. Seems all the little facts and factsies (medicine unfortunately has an insane amount of them) just went in by themselves when they were part of the maps.
I stil have the reflex today when I have to think something over - professionally or for private reasons - I automatically grab paper and pen and scribble notes on a postcard size piece of paper, maybe afterwards on a second one. When Iâm done, I can throw them away cause all of the thoughts are in my brain already, and all the little factsies I jotted down, just stick. Moreover, I discovered when I reading something my brain seems to arrange all the incoming facts just in a similar way inside automatically. It helps a lot when you have to quickly write an article off the cuff or make an excerpt after reading a 10 page concept paper just out of your mind. Itâs like you permanently train your âstructure muscleâ.
Nowadays Iâve switched a bit to electronic solutions, on my phone I mostly use Lekh Diagram (guess no one knows that android app :D). Itâs dead simple but very fast and the results are (admittedly) not very pretty. But it does the job. On phone the resulting diagrams have a plausible size to be viewed in a glance and a no-arrow-little-connectors-just-text diagram is easy and fast.
Itâs not 100 % as good and not exactly as fast as doing it on paper, but it already comes reasonably close and I can store it onlne.
Excalidraw looks like a reasonable thing too that I use once in a while, when it has to look a bit prettier, handlng it just takes a tiny bit more effort 
Making pics of paper diagrams and just upload them as images would probably work too in some cases, but personally I donât like the idea very much (no idea why honestly).
Integrating a tool like Excalidraw or anything similar to it into RemNote on a bullet point might be indeed a tremendous help for many. Regular training to connect the dots and brooding over ideas or concepts and the connections in between can be very valuable, it worked for me and quite a number of people I have taught in the past, and all the facts and factsies are reinforced in memory cause they also stick with the connections you make on paper and in mind.
I found out that connecting different diagrams to each other is not really necessary, cause they automatically connect together via the words you use on them (as long as you donât put them into boxes). This way you automatically go from big (overview) diagram to smaller (detail) ones without the need to externally connect them in some way.
I think it could be also beneficial to make each diagram a flashcard itself with title as front side and diagram as back side and just schedule them this way for spaced review and try to re-think the connections and facts in spaced intervals regularly. I did my reviews back then in a rather unplanned and random manner and mostly in bulk, but I needed on average 3 - 5 reviews to get it into my longterm memory, just as with facts on cards, so I guess basically the same memory rules apply for both.
Thus: I think integrating any sort of diagram tool (likely Excalidraw, but also possibly any other similar tool) could provide an enormous additional benefit for learning and understanding - and also contribute to bring ALL the thinking processes fully into RemNote.
Iâve put this post into Feature Requests for now, cause itâs basically about a useful new feature for RemNote. But any of the moderators or devs feel free to move it to Study Tips or Tools for Thought or any other category
Have a nice weekend altogether
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Itâs sometimes easier to express ideas in sketches.
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Would love to see the ability to draw and type onto images that have been pasted into documents.
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I wonder if there is some way to add Apple Pencil, Microsoft Ink etc and Watcom tablets, generic touch screen + stylus support that would be super cool
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