Today I spontaneously went on the empty #ArtAndPlay stage on #37C3, plugged in my laptop & started to silently demo #Emacs#orgmode to the surrounding people in full-screen so that people were not able to realize which tool I'm using.
I demoed the syntax (lists, tables, ...), spreadsheet functions, export to PDF & docx, task headings, bi-directional links, task dependencies, babel, PlantUML integration, ...
After a while, people started to come to me on stage and asked me what tool that is. 😃
@publicvoit I have two questions about bi-directional links: (1) do you use any tool to automate their creation and if so, which?, (2) what do you use them for? (I'm more interested in the second one, since it feels like I could easily write a tool myself to create bi-directional links.)
@publicvoit I have read that, though I had forgotten. It answers my first question (you use org-super-links to make bi-directional) but is silent on the second question: why would anyone want bi-directional links?
@publicvoit I agree! That's my current status: I don't use them precisely because I don't know what to use them for!
But I love learning from other people who have thought about things more deeply than I have. Reading about how other people use org convinced me to invest the time to learn about org myself. I was hoping that maybe somebody who already used bi-directional links would tell me what sort of things they use them for and I might be inspired to start using them myself.
@oantolin@publicvoit well, they can be useful when doing archeology. You can more easily find and navigate to related notes. With some capture templates some of these links will be to an unrelated note, a note you were in when you decided to start this new capture. So this can really surface interesting things, at least it has for me. A
@nickanderson@publicvoit Well having links to unrelated stuff I was working on at the time does sound interesting if somewhat random. To find the places I link to a particular note, I use search. I can imagine that if I didn't have to search, if I always had the backlinks in my face without having to ask for them I might be reminded of more connections. Do you make all your links bi-directional, and, if not, what criterion do you use for when to do so?
I can't say any objective criterion when to use bi-directional links and when normal links. It's just the momentary feeling that I might want to have a way to navigate from the target to the current heading or not.
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