zettels 0.6.0

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

In Luhmann’s own words: Communicating with Slip Boxes (translation of “Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen”).

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 -su once to initially build the index.

Usage

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

Build or update the index:

zettels -su

Shorthand for --silentupdate

Querying the index

Show a list of all zettels:

zettels

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

zettels -u

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

zettels file1.md

Show info about two zettels, e.g. file1.md and file2.md:

zettels file1.md file2.md

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

zettels -f file1.md

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

zettels -l file1.md

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

zettels -i file1.md

And finally, a bit of fun with pipes: Let’s say you want to see which zettels apart from file1.md itself link to the followups of file1.md:

zettels -f file1.md | zettels -i | grep -v file1.md

Try it with example data

Run e.g.

zettels -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]
...

If no such metadata is present, Zettels will replace it with appropriate “empty” values in the index:

• title: “untitled”

• tags: “[]”

• followups: “[]”

Instead of finishing the metadata block with ... you can also use ---.

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

In fact, a zettel file may contain several YAML-blocks. However, Zettels will only parse the first one. 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.

To manually link between zettels, use the “inline syntax” for markdown hyperlinks:

[link text](url)

Links between zettel files should be relative links. The same is true for entries in followups.

Output format

The output can be tweaked to your needs. In the settings file (default: ~/.config/zettels.cfg.yaml), you’ll find two settings:

• outputformat - standard format

• prettyformat - used when Zettels is called with the --pretty flag

These output formats are given as Python Format Strings. Query output consists of two fields that these format strings can process:

1. title - accessible by `'{0[0]}'`
2. path (relative to the Zettelkasten directory) - accessible by `'{0[1]}'`

By default the formats are:

outputformat: '{0[1]}'
prettyformat: '{0[0]:<40}| {0[1]}'

Standard outputformat just outputs the path(s) of the query results, prettyformat is a pseudo-table with the title(s) of the query result in the first column (which is at least 40 characters wide), and the path(s) in the second column.

The output format can also be tweaked on a per call basis with the -o flag, that takes a custom output format.

See the Python Format String Syntax for details.

Requirements

• Python 3.x

• grep & find– Your Python runtime must be able to find and execute the UNIX tools grep and find. Zettels is tested against GNU grep and GNU find, but other implementations should be fine, too.

• PyYaml

• pathspec>=0.5.0