Trying to understand the "everything is a Rem" and its implications

[syncretism]

I used to use roam and developed a habit of [[creating links]] like this one whenever I was typing. However there’s a big difference now if every single block itself is already the most atomic unit aka a Rem. This would mean that there is no active value in producing a separate [[link like this]] when you can simply type it in this block like so.

If you ever wanted to reference content in the above block, you would simply use square brackets [[search term]] and you’d be able to look at all the available Rems.

Which brings me to this question…

When do you create these orphan pages in RemNote? Do you really need them? And if so, why?

[UMNiK]

To be clear, you can create an infinite number of rem with the exact same text that are considered different by the program - just something to keep in mind when fulltext searching.

As to when to make top-level rem on the fly (which will be automatically tagged as #Stub, by the way), there are a few obvious “free” use cases: any proper nouns such as names of people, books, companies etc. and dates. Chances are, you want all references to those collected in a single place, but where that place itself is is not terribly important (obviously, you can add further tags or emoji to all of the above to make them collectable in a single place in turn and visually distinct when used as a reference. Personally, I use and for people and dates and a more convoluted system for sources). Other stuff is up to you, though in many cases it might be easier to manually create a draft rem at the outliner level you want and reference it rather than creating it by reference, moving it into its place from the top level, and removing the #Stub.

[dubclipper]

Your intuition is correct – you don’t really need to create those orphan pages.

UMNiK summed it up nicely already but I’ll add one more use case that I’ve been playing around with: stubs of curiosity. Say you’re reading a book and come across a concept the author assumes you already know or does a poor job of explaining it. Perhaps most of the time you get the gist of the idea and move on. But sometimes it may spark your curiosity so you can create the on-the-fly reference while writing notes about the book you’re currently reading. It’s automatically tagged as a “stub” so you don’t need to spend an ounce mental energy on this item, instead keeping focused on the task at hand. Later on, as your time/curiosity/energy permits, you go to the stub page to find such references. From there you may then expend mental energy dealing with it (be it a full-on research of the topic or just adding more meaningful tags/links (and/or removing #stub), moving it to somewhere else in your database, deleting it altogether – whatever).

[syncretism]

@UMNiK That makes a lot of sense to use them for ‘nouns’. I was wondering, let’s say - in a Evergreen note writing system - would it make any sense to create a Rem for an Evergreen note just like how Andy Matuschak would title each of his individual notes? Or would it be better to leave it as its own block Rem, which can be referenced later?

@dubclipper I see. In a way, it’s a better way of ‘referencing’ and finding old links to the same topic if I’m curious about exploring the same topic in future.

[UMNiK]

There is nothing stopping you making common noun flashcards or headers alongside creating more involved notes titled with sentences (either as a parent or as a front of a flashcard) and referencing them in each other. Both of those may also be tagged with any rem. In short, to your original topic title, the main implication of “everything is a rem” is that you really can create or replicate any organisation you want and change it on the fly. The notable limitations at the moment are a lack of queries or metadata, making tags inferior to using the outliner with portals when it comes to multi-adding things to multiple topics and having them be findable and usable later, i.e. manually created keynotes are your only option to gather relevant materials in one place, as there is no way to filter out some tags from a search portal.

See also https://github.com/hannesfrank/awesome-remnote#note-taking , the van Doorn article is a good place to start to get a quick overview of the possibilities (he doesn’t mention queries and does use what RemNote calls Universal Descriptors, i.e. named reusable connection types to aid in creating and evaluating references).