zettels 0.2.1

A command line tool implementing Luhmann's system of a "Zettelkasten".

Zettels is a command line tool implementing Niklas Luhmann’s system of a “Zettelkasten”.

It’s still in alpha stage and probably very buggy.

What does Zettels do?

Zettels is a command line tool to index markdown files (your zettels). It reads YAML-metadata blocks as defined by pandoc and also parses the markdown hyperlinks in each file.

The resulting index contains the metadata and the targets of the hyperlinks.

Have a look at the files in examples/Zettelkasten and examples/index.yaml to get a better idea.

Zettels can also be used to query the index. The output can then be piped to other tools (like grep or as arguments for the text editor of your choice).

It’s intended to be used for a “Zettelkasten” like Niklas Luhmann used it.

What the heck is a Zettelkasten?

“Zettel” is German for “note” or “slip of paper”. “Kasten” is German for “box”. Think of old style library catalogues.

Obviously, this piece of software is not a box of paper sheets. However, Niklas Luhmann used such a box in a very specific way for his academic work.

A wonderful introduction in Luhmann’s system of a Zettelkasten are the slides of a talk by Daniel Lüdecke: Introduction to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten-Thinking

If you speak German, there’s more:

• Luhmann, Niklas (1981): Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen. Ein Erfahrungsbericht. in: H. Baier / H.M. Kepplinger / K. Reumann (Eds.), Öffentliche Meinung und sozialer Wandel. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. pp. 22-28

• Daniel Lüdecke: Luhmanns Arbeitsweise im elektronischen Zettelkasten

• Thomas Schlesinger: Wissen konservieren und kuratieren mit dem Zettelkasten nach Niklas Luhmann

• Universität Bielefeld: Video - Einblicke in das System der Zettel - Geheimnis um Niklas Luhmanns Zettelkasten

What, no GUI?

True. A GUI for querying the index would be nice. However, as such, Zettels doesn’t provide one. It is intended to be used in a toolchain of UNIX-tools.

I myself edit my Zettelkasten in my favourite text editor and have created a little module that allows me to query its index from there. So, if you use Textadept or don’t care which text editor you use, have a look at ta-zettels.

Alternatives

If you’re looking for a GUI, all-in-one approach to implementing Luhmann’s idea into software, I can recommend Daniel Lüdecke’s Zettelkasten (sjPlot/Zettelkasten).

Installation and setup

1. Install using pip (or pip3, depending on your OS): pip install zettels

2. Run zettels --setup – follow the interactive setup process

3. Run zettels once without any parameters to initially build the index.

Usage

Run zettels -h for a complete list of options. Some examples:

Build or update the index:

zettels

Querying the index

Zettels has the query (shorthand q) subcommand to query the index.

Show a list of all zettels:

zettels query

Show a list of all zettels, but update the index first:

zettels query -u

Show info about a specific zettel, e.g. file1.md:

zettels query file1.md

Show a list of followups of a specific zettel, e.g. file1.md:

zettels query -f file1.md

Show a list of zettels a specific zettel links to, e.g. file1.md:

zettels query -t file1.md

Show a list of zettels linking to a specific zettel, e.g. file1.md:

zettels query -i file1.md

Try it with example data

Run e.g.

zettels q -s examples/zettels.cfg.yaml examples/Zettelkasten/file1.md

Zettel format

Zettels doesn’t require your markdown files to have a metadata block. But to be really effective parts of your Zettelkasten, a YAML metadata block containing an entry for title, tags and followups is necessary.

---
title:  'Example Zettel'
tags: [example, question]
followups: [file.md, subdir/anotherfile.md, ../yetanotherfile.md]
...

Entries in followups should be relative to the zettel. The same is true for hyperlinks in the zettel body. The metadata block may contain a variety of other entries (e.g. author, date) – maybe for other tools, like pandoc – but those other entries are ignored by Zettels and do not become part of Zettels’ index.

Output format

The output of the query subcommand can be tweaked to your needs by editing it in the settings file (default: ~/.config/zettels.cfg.yaml).

It’s a python format string that receives the title of a zettel and its path as arguments. The default output format is:

'{0[0]:<50}| {0[1]}''

These can be accessed by {0[0]} (title) and {0[1]} (path).

If you want the output to be e.g. only the path, change the outputformat setting to

{0[1]}

See the Python Format String Syntax for details.

Requirements

• Python 3.x

• grep – Your Python runtime must be able to find and execute grep.

• PyYaml