Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Linking is very important in Zavala. It allows Zavala to function as a PKM system. Traditionally these are a lot like a personal Wiki that a user can build up and maintain for themselves.

Linking enables us to create links to other Outlines within Zavala. As you would expect, we can also create links to pages on the Web in Zavala. Additionally we can create links to other resources on your device, like an email message and allow other applications to link to Outlines in Zavala.

Linking in Zavala

Linking between outlines is easy. Use the Link button or the ⌘-K shortcut to open the Link Dialog. It will help you autocomplete the Outline title and link to use.

You use the same Link Dialog to create links other links, say to a web page. Just enter a the text you want to have underlined and clickable with the link and hit Add.

Fast Linking

You may have already typed in some text in Zavala that you want to link and have copied a link to the Pasteboard. If so, you can just highlight the text you want to turn into a link and paste using ⌘-V or a menu item. Zavala will convert the selected text to a link pointing at the link from the Pasteboard.

You can ask Zavala to automatically pull the title of a web page and make a link from it. Just open an Outline’s Get Info Dialog and enable the feature. Then when you paste or drag a link into Zavala, we will fetch the webpage and pull its title to change the text of the link for you.

This is very useful for doing research or making lists. For example, if you are trying to find the best product of some kind, you may end up looking at multiple products on the web. Just drag the link from your browser into Zavala. Zavala will turn it into a nice link. You can then use the The Notes Field to make comments on the different products.

Since you may be doing research on sensitive subjects, we don’t enable this feature by default. If you want to use it for all new Outlines, there is a setting to enable in Settings.

Linking from Zavala to an App

If an application puts a link on the Pasteboard with the name of the resource, Zavala can link to it. For example, if drag an email out of Mail.app to Zavala we will create a link to that email. Clicking that link in Zavala will open Mail.app and show you the original mail message.

  • Linking to the Web

Linking to Zavala

To get the URL to use to link to Zavala, you first press the Share button and then click on the Copy Document Link option. This copies the URL to the pasteboard. Different apps have different ways of inputing links, but most support the ⌘-K keyboard shortcut.