Zeminary

Zeminary is in Alpha until September 7th

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Alot of people asked for usecases. I'll make example documents in the future. Some off the top of my head:

(1) translating & comparing & annotating translations

(2) annotating dense works in humanities / philosophy and law

(3) annotating books & film scripts & editing them & playing with their text

(4) writing an essay where i have to juggle many ideas at once / i put the ideas on the side or the comments while weaving them into the draft (like joecool1029)

(5) planning the company roadmap / the vertical line is events by time / the horizontal is extra details about the event

(6) storyboarding films / keeping track of characters, settings, cameras, etc.

(7) writing a book

(I'm in a kind of rush and your comment really inspired me, so the organization in this reply is pretty bad.)

Well, there's nothing this or Treesheets does that nothing else (in MS Office) can't do or approximate. It's just different degrees of freedom and fuckupability. More degrees of freedom means more ways to misdirect attention. This is very bad for classicalish artists who have to take in the whole work and make and edit each part with the whole in mind. But also for people writing long books. Zeminary is biased towards getting big things done.

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Things off the top of my head A

I had a discussion a while ago about how email being uneditable is actually a feature. It forces you to focus more on writing and less on editing. Email threads also force you to understand a thing in time. Being able to forward and do emaily things helps you to get feedback. All this helps to free you from perfection so that you can / are free to perfect. But the foundation is uneditability.

Standardization comes with limits. It makes for better communicability. People aren't met with the possibility of a mess of explicit hierarchies. Authors aren't so freely given the possibility.

Limits are features.

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Things off the top of my head B

It's easier to get into FPSs vs MOBAs because you only need to know a few things to get started. WASD to move. SPACE to jump. Leftclick to shoot. Rightclick to zoom. Something to crouch with, something to sprint with. It's also easier to get into some MOBAs than others because you only need to know a few maps and movesets. Both types of games are very fun, very profitable, very complicated. But FPSs are obviously easier for people to pick up on and enjoy — the learning curve to complex fun ratio is just better.

I deleted links & backlinks from Matrix / Tensor Classic in the last week before the launch. I'm saving them & alot of other things for Matrix / Tensor Pro. I think links and references lock you prematurely into premature mental models. I know for some of my artwork, I've iterated on the concept alone 50 to 100 times, then on the work itself 50 to 100 times.

One of my overarching principles for life and work is the "Multidimensional Thermopylae". I try to limit the surface areas of confrontation (making apps, doing things, etc.) to just a single point or easily addressable set of points, then I punch with everything I got. I try to set up my life to maximize those "Multidimensional Thermopylaes".

Zeminary is meant to be a "Multidimensional Thermopylae" for certain kinds of work, (chordal/contrapuntal/holistic thinking).

Finished testing it.

The markdown module works well as long as you don't use the fulleditor and the floateditor. But this creates an inconsistent user experience. I've decided to leave it out as a core feature for now.

I'll revisit it in the future. If I can fix it, great. If I can't, I might put it in with warnings that it doesn't work for the fulleditor and the floateditor.

I will!

I'll have to create a diff shortcut scheme for Apple users.

Besides what's already been brought up, what other problems do you think there are?

Zeminary was heading down that direction. But then I realized it might be better to maintain separate apps.

For starters, Matrix (Classic) is only 2000 lines of code right now. This makes the codebase easy to maintain, and easy for developers to grok/mod.

Other than that, I think limitations are a good thing. You don't need 3D or 4D or XD when 2D is enough. Freedom can mean the freedom to fuck up.

Thanks.

A video would take a really long time. I'll make one when I'm done fixing everything. One thing you could try right now is making a 10x10 grid, then clearing the borders of the 2nd column from the left. Everything on the right would be inspiration or raw material. The leftmost column would be the actual draft.

Andy Matuschak talks alot about peripherals. I don't know if you know his writings.

Sorry. Cell would be better. Thanks for catching that.

Straight from Excel.

Are you using it on mobile? It's meant to be used on desktop.

I'll definitely make a comparison video or post.

COPYPASTE: A video would take a really long time. I'll make one when I'm done fixing everything. One thing you could try right now is making a 10x10 grid, then clearing the borders of the 2nd column from the left. Everything on the right would be inspiration or raw material. The leftmost column would be the actual draft.

It's just an analogy of music. Music is a succession of sounds. Ideamusic is a succession of ideas. Here's the guiding philosophy of Zeminary if you don't have a Twitter.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GECsGXoAEU3l6?format=png&name=...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GEQbGWUAAmZJ5?format=png&name=...

It's kinda "out there" tbh.

It's a bit "out there" as a guiding philosophy for a tech product. Here are the images.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GECsGXoAEU3l6?format=png&name=...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GEQbGWUAAmZJ5?format=png&name=...

The roadmap is on that tweet. It relates to Zeminary and what's in the images.

Thanks! Glad to finally have someone have a use for this.

Can you tell me more about your usecases?

Off the top of your head, what might be a better shortcut scheme for Zeminary?

Fun was a big part of it. If you use the hotkeys, it feels like a game with everything snapping about.

Scrivener was my first writing app that wasn't a part of MS Office. I also recommend it.

Tangentially, for anyone wondering — Zeminary isn't meant to replace other PKM and writing apps. You can have your ideas elsewhere, then assemble them in Zeminary.

Zeminary is complementary.

Thanks for driving the point home.

I'll add tutorial text to the grids you see right now.

I did half-ass the launch. I didn't expect it to actually be on the landing page of hackernews. I was expecting to just have a few users to talk to about it.

Well, it's still linear, but with more dimensions. It thinks of writing as a progression of chords rather than as a progression of arpeggiations.

EDIT: Actually, no you're right. It's nonlinear.

I'll add in drag to move points.

What's the problem with drag to resize?

I'll add tooltips as someone else suggested earlier.

I'll add hover options to make it easier to add new rows and columns.

I've been relying on hotkeys for a long time (you can click the question mark to see the interactions and hotkeys available to you). Thanks for bringing up those mouse-related UI problems.

Here's my guiding philosophy (on Twitter).

Zeminary to me is supposed to be an Ideamusicsheet.

I didn't want to call it that in my post cause that just ... sounds a bit kooky.

https://twitter.com/Zeminary/status/1432571606744899587

Zeminary is more for artists than technologists.

Artists are very concerned with relationships of meaning and time.

When I write, I really only have one main line of thought, but to grasp what that thought means, I have to decompose it. I need to write to the side, to show that at this point in time, this and other thoughts arise. I don't want just the final line, I want to see all the lines that make up that line.

That's overkill for alot of usecases, but necessary for mine.

I also do alot of annotations of dense philosophical works. I have to seriously grasp them because I want my art to cohere.

I guess you could say Zeminary is a metathinking app. Or a chordal or a contrapuntal thinking app. It makes Ideamusic more deliberate.

You can do the same work in other places, but Zeminary makes it alot easier for me. For example, writing in one place doesn't cause everything else to shift around. Images and extra context local to a specific grid can be hidden in that grid (scrollable). The soft shadows help to "bleed" ideas. You can unborder grids to separate context. The bareness and the lack of distracting UI helps me to focus. Movable mindmaps are easier to pull off. There's marks, there's multipoint comments. There's alot of subtle touches. Etc. I'll be adding more feature layers in the future.

One of my future art projects is to write a 4096 part work based on the King Wen Sequence. 64 x 64 = 4096. It'll be very dense. I'm making Zeminary Tensor for that.

Zeminary Tensors might even become an app of choice for anyone looking to author & publish large textworks.

And progressive summarization / expansion / composition.

And analogical thinking.

That's one benefit of Zeminary over other word processors.

You can edit a paragraph without shifting the whole text.

It gets really useful when you have to write a book or thesis or movie script. Anything very long really.

Something I noticed working with the JS editor in Zeminary was that the load time increased exponentially with more and more text and formatting.

So chunking it helped to offset that problem. I don't know if Word has that problem. But I know I can load the Zeminary equivalent of a 100k words formatted Word file in about 5% or 10% the time.

That's exactly what led me to make Zeminary. I kept running into problems with decomposing my thoughts in a way that didn't interfere with my main line of thought. Or with trying to grasp all the thoughts in a situation.

Thanks for the GIF suggestion.

Thanks for catching those UTF-8 errors.

Thanks for letting me know about the title attribute.

Yeah, I actually used it exactly like a higher resolution Trello to plan out this and other apps and the roadmap.

I'll make an example document sometime soon and post it on hackernews as guerilla marketing.

So, the main set of thoughts goes up and down, and the thoughts about the main set of thoughts go to the left and right. Usually on the same level but sometimes not.

Writing books, movies, screenplays, etc. Contexts where subtext is heavy. Contexts where meaning per time is dense.

I'm planning to be able to export this as an HTML on top of those formats.

You'll be able to upload your Zeminary writings as a static webpage.

I'll change the indentations.

I'll make the changes inside the webpage.

It's like Excel but without automatic grids. You have to add them manually.

The way I write, I think things and then I think ABOUT things. Word & Excel's structures kinda work for this but not exactly. Excel didn't have enough freedom and was clearly designed for numbercrunching and all the extra features also got in the way of thinking. Word had too much freedom.

Also, they were really slow after a certain size.

So I made Zeminary.

EDIT: my guiding philosophy and roadmap https://twitter.com/Zeminary/status/1432571606744899587

I feel the same.

Do you know of anyone else doing anything similar in the space?

Can you expand on that? Everyone talks about Zettelkasten but not the products of Zettelkasten. It'd be nice to know more about your opinion on Luhmann's work.