Perhaps the experts can provide some best-practices insight. I’m looking for guidance on working with several link meshes concurrently. Let’s look at the minimal case:
I am reading article A and invoke Hook to copy a link. I then open a log book in Obsidian and want to hook A to a note there, A1, which I do.
I am then reading article B and once again invoke Hook to copy a link. I navigate to a different tab in Safari (call it A2) and realize the article there should be linked to article A, but the current “active” copied link Hook knows about is now B, not A.
I could navigate back to A, invoke Hook and copy the link, then navigate back to the tab with article A2 and hook A2 to A, but this seems like extra and avoidable clicking around just to, in a sense, reset the focus my mesh of hooks with A as the center.
Even a simple submenu in the Hook menu, Hook to Previous Mesh that listed, say, the last five meshes that I was working with, would be helpful.
I assume it is not uncommon to be working with multiple articles with documents related in a hooked mesh. Sorry, if my terminology is not common, but that’s the way I’m thinking of this.
Hook has a Recent items option (set in General preferences, or gear menu). And you can Pin bookmarks. Those cover two of the most common sets of cases.
It may also be handy to create treat a particular file (or other resource) as a “hub” or “project” file/resource/node, and hook items to them. The node can be anything linkable, really: e.g. a project in OmniFocus, Things, Tasks, TaskPaper; something in Curio, DEVONthink, EagleFiler, Yojimbo, etc. whatever…
There are of course different modes of note taking: article-based and “syntopical” (to use Mortimer Adler’s term) or simply “topical” / “comparative”.
Your thoughtful post suggests we should do more sharing about personal information management here. The forum has a Showcases and Use Cases category that is under utilized. I would encourage people to share their use cases.
… also, @LucB is there a setting – or a hidden preference – to make the Hook context window persistent, always on top of other windows, and responsively updating to whatever app/window has the focus. I would like Hook’s window around without being dismissed while I am working between apps.
the closest at the moment is this: General Preferences Tab – Hook, “Automatically hide Hook” (boolean), which you’ve probably seen. I always hesitate to provide specific dates. I can say we’ve had a few versions of this in house, and internally pivoted how we’ll do this, and that it remains on our high priority list.
Coming soon if all goes well will be enhancements to search , multi-monitors and sharing. Hopefully a public beta this week.
