⚡️ A blazing fast way of maintaining powerful notes with connections between them.

Tirth Jain

Last update: Dec 2, 2022

Related tags

Command-line zettl

Overview

Zettl

⚡️ A blazing fast way of maintaining powerful notes with connections between them.

Installing Zettl

To install Zettl, you will need the Rust toolchain installed. You can install Rust using rustup. Once you have Rust installed, clone the repository and install the binary using cargo.

$ git clone https://github.com/hedonhermdev/zettl
$ cargo install --path zettl

Initializing Zettl

You will need to create a directory to store your notes. You can tell zettl to use this directory by setting the $ZETTL_DIRECTORY variable. Note that zettl will use this directory for all operations so you will probably have to set this variable in your .bashrc (or your .zshrc).

> .bashrc ">

$ mkdir ~/kasten
$ echo "export ZETTL_DIRECTORY=~/kasten" >> .bashrc

Initializing zettl creates a .zettl directory in your base directory.

$ zettl init

Configuring Zettl

You can change config options by setting values in the config file.

$ vim $ZETTL_DIRECTORY/.zettl/config.yml

Currently, zettl supports the following options:

---
name: My Zettelkasten
author: Me
editor_cmd: vim
editor_args: []
indexes: true
graph: true

An example, customised config will look like this:

---
name: My Zettelkasten
author: Tirth Jain
editor_cmd: nvim
editor_args:
  - "+Goyo"
  - "+Limelight"
indexes: true
graph: true

Using Zettl

Once Zettl is initialized, you can use it to write notes from anywhere.

# Create a new fleeting note. These are like daily notes.
$ zettl fleet
# Create a new note. This will be created in notes/some-idea.md. 
$ zettl note some-idea
# Create a new note in a category. This will be created in notes/project1/some-idea.md.
$ zettl note project1/some-idea

These commands will open a markdown file in the editor you specified.

Graphs and Indexes

Zettl creates _index.md files in each directory to index your notes. You can turn this off by setting the following in the config directory.

indexes: false

The fleets/_index.md file will look kind of like this:

---
title: Fleets Index
author: Tirth Jain
created: "2021-04-29 11:16:25"
---

# Fleets Index

- [[fleets/2021-04-28]]
- [[fleets/2021-04-29]]

Similarly, Zettl creates a .graph.json file to track connections between your notes. You can visualize this graph with a visualizer of your choice. I prefer 3d-force-graph. Note that connections are made using the [[mediawiki]] link format.

To turn off this graph generation:

graph: false

To manually create the graph and the indexes, you can run:

$ zettl graph
$ zettl index

How Your Notes are Saved

Zettl saves your notes as markdown files. After a few days of using zettl, your zettl directory will look something like this:

/Users/hedonhermdev/kasten
├── _index.md
├── fleets
│   ├── 2021-04-28.md
│   ├── 2021-04-29.md
│   └── _index.md
└── notes
    ├── SDNs
    │   ├── _index.md
    │   └── p4-notes.md
    ├── _index.md
    ├── devops
    │   ├── _index.md
    │   ├── git-server-setup.md
    │   └── homegrown-autodeployment.md
    ├── git
    │   ├── _index.md
    │   ├── cli.md
    │   ├── error-handling.md
    │   ├── git-in-rust.md
    │   ├── implementation.md
    │   └── internal-objects.md
    ├── how-to-zettel.md
    ├── vim
    │   ├── _index.md
    │   ├── autocmds.md
    │   └── vimrc-for-servers.md
    ├── workflow.md
    ├── zettl
    │   ├── _index.md
    │   ├── philosophy.md
    │   └── roadmap.md

Integrations

While zettl doesnt have a programmatic way to support integrations (yet!) but here are some integrations I can think of:

Version control with git

$ cd $ZETTL_DIRECTORY
$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Saving notes"

Publish your notes as a static site with Hugo. This theme handles mediawiki links as well.

$ ln -s $ZETTL_DIRECTORY path/to/hugo/content
$ hugo serve

Comments

Add list command to show all notes

I added a list command to show all notes with a flag to show all fleeting notes as well.

This can be used in conjunction with fzf to get fuzzy finding on notes.

opened by hardliner66 1
Publish on crates.io

I really like this tool. It would be great if you could publish it on crates.io. Installation would go from memorizing or searching the github url, to cargo install zettl.

opened by hardliner66 0
Add flag to tell zettl to open a fleeting note

This allows reopening fleeting notes directly with zettl, but will fail if desired fleeting note is not present. If the parameter is not given, the behavior stays the same as before.

Together with #4 this can be used with fzf as well. So you can fuzzy search for dates and open them with zettl.

opened by hardliner66 0
Create ZETTEL_DIRECTORY if it doesn't exist

Currently you have to create the directory ~/zettel yourself before calling zettl init. I would be nice if the tool could create this dir if it doesn't exist (e.g.: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/fs/fn.create_dir_all.html).

opened by hardliner66 0
Ability to set Templates
A user must be able to configure a template for fleets or notes. This would be especially helpful with fleets as they would make making things like day planners much more convenient.

Something like

$ zettl note -t template1 note1
opened by hedonhermdev 0
Ability to Add Optional Tags To Notes
Tags should be saved in the frontmatter something like this:

--- ... tags: ["tag1", "tag2", "tag3"] ---

The CLI should accept tags using a flag.

$ zettl note note1 -t tag1 -t tag2 -t tag3

While we're at it, the zettl list command should also be able to filter with a specific tag.

$ zettl list -t tag1
enhancement help wanted good first issue
opened by hedonhermdev 0
Fish shell plugin to integrate fzf with zettl

With #4 and #5 merged, one can now use something like fzf to fuzzy find on the notes.

To simplify this, I made a fish shell plugin that does just that: https://github.com/hardliner66/zettl-fzf

If you want, you can link it in your readme.

opened by hardliner66 0