The number of source files in waterline more than doubled this week, as I ported into it all of my applications from the 2025–26 season, as well as the majority of my annotated books and papers from the past few years. Since I moved resolutely to Linux and away from DEVONthink, these have been sitting in a folder in my Dropbox titled for_dt without any real systematization. Using @rookery/bibtex, I now have a mapping of every meaningful citation in my Zotero vault to an idea in waterline, and in turn can reference local documents and notebooks (PDFs with handwritten notes generated on a reMarkable) from that citational idea. This is a much smoother way of referencing texts within my writing environment, as the bibtex key essentially does double duty as the way I can get a well-formatted citation to the text, e.g. @knuthComputerProgrammingArt1992[p.2], and as a way to reference a page that links to the original text (if I have it) and the notes about it, e.g. @idea:knuthComputerProgrammingArt1992.
Beyond filling out my main rookery, I also vibe-coded a remarks tool to bring content from my reMarkable into waterline in a well-structured way. I’ve started writing a blog post about this, so I won’t get into the details: but I’m pretty happy with how it’s all working! It’s a rite of passage in the note-taking world to develop your own idiosyncratic system for note-taking—just as it’s a rite of passage in the blogging world to develop your own idiosyncratic system for blogging (rookery)—and I’m well on my way with my collection of Linux machines.11 I have a Framework Desktop and a Framework laptop, plus two reMarkables which run a Linux distribution called reMarkable OS, which you can SSH into and hack on.