Workspaces as a primitive
Authored By:: Rob Haisfield
What are powerful primitives for a user of a decentralized knowledge graph
Workspaces enable users to pick up their old context and investigation where they left off
- #Twitter thread Rob Haisfield: 🤯️ Freeze by @jasonyuandesign @tylerangert @szymon_k seems incredible! I’ve been talking for a while in snippets about saved workspaces as a primitive in tools for thought, but with Freeze bringing the concept to desktop, it’s time for a thread! 🧵️ https://freeze.app/ *
- Imagine you’re writing a paper or a technical spec in a Word Doc. You work until you’re halfway done, and then save it to finish later. You also have a few notes open as reference material. You can re-open the Word Doc later, but you reopen the ref material separately. *
- What if you wanted to have your reference material open every time you reopen the Doc? If you’re only saving one file at a time, then the best you could do is maybe write down your ref material in a checklist for next time. *
- I posit that most knowledge work is not contained in a single document. You don’t just want to re-immerse yourself in the work, but also the context of your work. *
- On my hypertext garden, every page is interconnected with others, so it’s genuinely hard to edit and release one note at a time. Everything is autosaved, but Obsidian also lets me save and reload arrangements of pages for later. This helps me manage my mental stack. Obsidian’s workspace model does feel clunky though - ideally, we would be able to create and destroy workspaces in an instant, form relationships between workspaces as independent entities, form relationships based on coexistence within a workspace, and search within the contents of a workspace. https://t.co/rLVzjc7Zku *
- Of course, Emacs did it first (tm). Emacs lets you save your current session to a file, which you can search for and restore later. https://t.co/PFMdBMw6M5 *
- Iian Neill has an interesting variation where each workspace can contain multiple file types (text, media, websites…). The workspace is an entity on a graph, as well as all of its contents. This turns workspaces into a core organizational structure. https://twitter.com/RobertHaisfield/status/1326186101053140992?s=20 *
- Codex OS is also doing something really cool where you can see a little preview of the contents of each workspace. Codex has the most powerful implementation of workspaces I have seen so far. https://twitter.com/codexeditor/status/1341374670331756547?s=20 *
- WorldBrain Memex lets you save all of your browser tabs to a collection and then you can full text search their contents. Collections aren’t restricted to this purpose, but they can be used like this. https://t.co/YdOURtdK6U *
- What makes Freeze cool is that it can save your workspace in a way that spans multiple applications and allows you to search their contents. It’s not out yet, but I’m really curious to follow its development 👀️ *
