Visual Studio Code is an integrated development environment (IDE) built and maintained by Microsoft. It is offered free of charge.

vscode

Dendron is a Visual Studio Code extension that allows you to easily manage your personal notes. 

You can use it to track your daily todos or reference notes. 

Features Dendron ships with:

- markdown
- markdown preview
- fast note navigation
- fast note creation
- backlinks
- opt-in note schemas
- note graph

Dendron is a Visual Studio Code extension that you can download and install free of charge.

To download a visual studio code extension, we press Command + Shift + P on the Mac. Then you type: install extensions. Search for Dendron and download all the related plugins.

To initialize a Dendron Workspace, we use Command + Shift + P and type `Dendron: initialize workspace`.

This activates the extension and creates the minimum amount of Dendron files we need to get started.

Download and Install a Dendron Workspace

To create a note in Dendron, we use the look up window. This modal pop up defaults to a scratch note but we want to create a note called `dendron.note.md`.

You delete the scratch text and enter `dendron`. From here, you will see all of the notes that are associated with this hierarchy. Now you can type `dendron.note` to create a new markdown file.

This note is a child note of `dendron` and a sibling note of `dendron.welcome`.

Create a new note using Dendrons look up tool

Dendron Tree View is a side panel in VSCode that renders a folder structure of your notes based on your hierarchies. 

Since all your notes are in a single flat file, Dendron has created a Tree View to render a collapsable folder like view for your notes.

Dendron Tree View

In this lesson, we take a look at the keyboard shortcuts that Dendron provides us to navigate our hierarchy of notes.

Heres a quick cheat sheet:

- `CMD+SHIFT+ down arrow`: navigate down into your hierarchy
- `CMD+SHIFT+ up arrow`: navigate up your hierarchy
- `CTRL+SHIFT+ [`: navigate over your sibling notes
- `CTRL + SHIFT+ ]`: navigate over sibling notes the other way

Navigate Hierarchical Notes in Dendron

You can use `CMD+L` to look up a note in the same hierarchy that you are currently in. 

If you know the note you want to create or find is in the same hierarchy tree, this is a fast way to find it.

Quick Note Look up in Dendron

Dendron has baked in support for creating daily notes. This is a place where you can take quick notes on something or if you don't know where to put a note yet. 

You can use `CMD + SHIFT + I` to create a daily note. 

These notes default to `daily.journal.yyyy.mm.dd` hierarchy.

Create a daily note with Dendron

Insert a Snippet In Dendron with VSCode Snippets

Insert an Image into a Note with Dendron

Create a Backlink to a Note in Dendron

You can link to a new note from selected text with `CMD + SHIFT + S`.

This is useful for when you want to take notes on a todo that you are working on or you discover that there are sub tasks to the task you are doing.

Create a link to a new note from selected text in Dendron

Sometimes you have text in a file you want to move to a new file, Dendron supports this by using the same lookup command `CMD + SHIFT + S`.

You then have to select the `Selection Extraction` option in the lookup menu. This will take the selected text and move it to the new note. 

Upgrade your note taking workflow with VS Code and Dendron

Ian Jones

Free Community Resource

Free Community Resource

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