Adding Merge Note Feature to Workflow

Merging Notes with Obsidian and ZKVR: An Engaging Workflow

In my notetaking workflow, I frequently use the merge note feature in Obsidian. This feature is a powerful tool that allows me to clean up old notes and update all the backlinks of a note to point to a new one.

Recently, I found myself wishing for a similar feature within zkvr, my terminal user interface graph IDE. I set out to implement this feature and found the resulting workflow to be highly engaging.

The process feels organic as I build up larger and larger notes. I can easily copy text between notes or append whole notes into other notes with merges. It’s an efficient way to consolidate and organize my thoughts and work.

Upon implementing the merge feature, I immediately merged dozens of notes. Here are some of the commit messages from newest to oldest after implementing the merge feature:

merge github actions fixes information into github actions
big merge, all kb conversion details
merge in kb script list work into here
merge lists of old stuff together
merge together
...
merge file and clean up
merge

This new workflow has transformed my note-taking process and made managing my work far more enjoyable and efficient. The ability to merge notes organically has been a game-changer.

The Algorithm

• select a link from the current card into which to merge the current card
• write to a temp file
• call awk script to merge the destination readme and the source readme into temp file
• remove self references from resulting file
• copy temp file to destination README
• set current document to point to destination README
• delete current card directory
• run enrich step within zkvr to update all backlinks