Zettelpy

A personal knowledge management system based on Zettelkasten, the name it's basically because it's written mostly in Python.

Some notes:

• The creation of tags (basically linking notes between each other using ctags) you need to add them manually to the second line of each note, I haven't found a way of automating this as of right now.
• I think this cli only works in Linux and for terminal based editors like Vim or Neovim.
• I'm very open to PR or suggestions.
• There's a todo list at the end of the file with things that I need to add.

How to install

You need to put ~/.local/bin in the $PATH of your default shell, so put this line in your .zshrc or .bashrc and reboot

export PATH=$PATH:/home/$USER/.local/bin

Then make sure to move inside this repo and run

./install.sh

Note: Don't move the repo because the launcher will not be able to find the virtual environment

How to uninstall

To uninstall you need to delete the repo, the launcher, and the config file

rm ~/path/to/repo/Zettelpy
rm ~/.config/zettelpyrc.ini
rm ~/.local/bin

You already have everything related to python installed, now you need to run the program once, this will generate a config file and exit the program so that you can modify it

zettelpy # This will quit the program inmediately, read what it says

The config file

So basically you now have a file to configure the program, most of us will have it in ~/.config/zettelpyrc.ini after this you need to go to the needed directory inside this projects repo and copy .ctags.d and .rgignore to the root of your notes directory.

cd needed
cp -r .ctags.d .rgignore ~/root/of/notes/directory

And now everything should work.

Dependencies

• Python 3.6 or later, there's some function that I think are not present on versions below 3.4.
• For identifying the Luhmann-ID I'm using ctags, it works well with Neovim.
• Ripgrep, to search for the ID from outside.
• Some program to view the notes, see the config file, by default I choosed okular beacuse it's what I use.

Usage:

Fleeting notes

The everyday notes you take them with this mode. As you can see, you can't have a note called Fleeting on the root directory of the notes.

zettelpy Fleeting

Or simply:

zettelpy

Create notes with Title

You can create or view notes for a book, or about something that you want to permanently save. Use quotes for names with spaces and add the extension.

zettelpy Books/"The Aleph.md"

Search notes by the ID

When you are inside the note that you created, you will see on the second line of the file there's a ## @ place holder, there you can put your ID, it would be useful to connect each note between each other, and to search for them.

zettelpy @1b2e

This will try to locate a note that on the second line has a ## @1b2e

Access to the last edited/viewed note

As with the fleeting notes, you can type lastOpenedNote and it would open the last note that you access, as it happens with Fleeting, you can't have a note called lastOpenedNote on the root of you directory of notes, because it will launch the mode, not the note of the same name.

zettelpy lastOpenedNote

Flags

View

It doesn't matter the note that you were working on, it will open it with okular.

zettelpy -v Books/"The Aleph.md"

zettelpy -v lastOpenedNote

zettelpy @3b7s -v

I haven't put the effort to make it for you to change the default viewer for now it's okular

Indexing

If you want to see the tree of notes pass the -i flag, it will throw you into you editor(in my case neovim), where you could move to any file and gf to move to the file

zettelpy -i

Note about this flag: If you give this flag it will show you the index of notes, and it the background it will clean empty files and refresh ctags, everything that comes after the -i flag will be ignored

Things that I need to add

There's a bunch of them, honestly I only made this program to see if I liked Python, I will add them while I'm learning about it.

I will list them in here:

• Add a warning and create a note with that tag instead of throwing an error when introducing a non existing ID
• Automatic tag generation and insertion
• Use a database to store the notes
• Define dependencies for python

The project is a mess

Yes, it's a mess, I don't even know what I'm trying to accomplish in here, this is going to be another one of those projects. Just don't use it because there's a lot of things that I'm not providing to make it work correctly and safely.