What is a Zettelkasten?

A Zettelkasten is a structured collection of notes. The Zettelkasten is a tool to approach complex ideas and concepts. It serves to support and structure one’s thinking about essential topics. Thus the note box can help to formulate and publish own thoughts.

Zettel is the German word for a small piece of paper, and Kasten means box. So a Zettelkasten is a box full of small pieces of paper. Therefore a Zettelkasten is often referred to as a slip box.

The idea of a slip box goes back to Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) [1]. An exceptionally productive sociologist measured by his publications. Söhnke Ahrens explained Luhmann’s approach in his book “Das Zettelkasten-Prinzip” [2] and contributed significantly to popularizing the concept. The book was translated into English under “How to take smart notes.“ Through this title, one can find numerous explanations of the methodology on the Internet.

How to set up a digital Zettelkasten?

To use the system, you don’t need any special software. Any Editor (e.g. VSCode, Atom, Vim, etc.) capable of editing Markdown can be used.

Every slip (zettel) is a simple markdown file. These markdown files might contain images or mathematical formulas.

Using the Zettelkasten is 95% about how to write notes and how to name them. Just 5% is about organizing these notes with tools4zettelkasten. Please refer to my “step by step guide” on how to setup a Zettelkasten. https://www.mycelium-of-knowledge.org/step-by-step-instructions-for-setup-and-use-of-the-zettelkasten/

How to use tools4zettelkasten?

python -m tools4zettelkasten

python -m tools4zettelkasten stage --help

...
01_12_Quality_of_notes_eccb21483.md
01_12a_How_to_integrate_notes_into_the_note_box_e0d27e3ad.md
01_12a_1_Integration_of_fleeting_notes_97a19382a.md
01_12a_2_Integration_of_literature_notes_ec83f31a2.md
01_12b_Working_with_alphanumeric_Ordering_en036a6bd.md
01_13_How_to_revisit_notes_a161a7e7c.md
...

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01_12_Quality_of_notes_eccb21483.md
01_13_How_to_integrate_notes_into_the_fleeting_box_e0d27e3ad.md
01_13_1_Integration_of_fleeting_notes_97a19382a.md
01_13_2_Integration_of_literature_notes_ec83f31a2.md
01_14_Working_with_alphanumeric_Ordering_en036a6bd.md
01_15_How_to_revisit_notes_a161a7e7c.md
...

How to setup the tools4zettelkasten?

Right now tools4zettelkasten is still in alpha mode. You need to download or clone the repo. You can start the scripts via the command line:

python -m tools4zettelkasten

You will have to install the missing dependencies via pip. So you may want to use a virtual environment. See https://rreben.github.io/tools4zettelkasten/ for further information.

I am planning to publish tools4zettelkasten as a package on PyPI. So you can install it via pip.

First of all you have to tell tools4zettelkasten where to find the directory of your zettelkasten.

You could use the following directory structure: We store the Markdown files in a simple folder with the following directory structure:

├── input/
│   └── images/
└── mycelium/
    └── images/

Any other directory structure is possible, but you need to have the images in the images/ directory, if you want to use the flask server.

First of all use the show command to show the current configuration:

python -m tools4zettelkasten show

In MacOS you can use the following command to set the environment variables:

export ZETTELKASTEN=/Users/me/Documents/zettelkasten/mycelium/
export ZETTELKASTEN_INPUT=/Users/me/Documents/zettelkasten/input/

Where /Users/me/Documents/zettelkasten/mycelium/ is the directory of your zettelkasten and /Users/me/Documents/zettelkasten/input/ is the directory of your input folder.

How to contribute?

See https://rreben.github.io/tools4zettelkasten/ for more information on how to build and use this project.

See https://www.mycelium-of-knowledge.org/ for a discussion of the project.

The documentation can also be found at https://tools4zettelkasten.readthedocs.io/en/latest/