Zettelpy

A personal knowledge management system based on Zettelkasten

Some notes:

• This is a personal project that I started to learn a little bit of Python, meaning that it has a lot of bugs and missing features.
• I'm open to suggestions.
• I think this CLI only works in Unix like OSes.
• Make sure to be inside the directory when running the installer
• Don't move or delete the repo because the launcher will not be able to find the virtual environment
• You need to add .local/bin to your $PATH in order to launch this program
• To update you can git pull
• I don't know how this program behaves with GUI text editors, I only use terminal based text editors like Neovim.

How to install

You can run the installer, and if you want to change the default directory in which the notes are stored you can export an environment variable, the default directory is at ~/zettelpy.

./install.sh

export ZETTELPY_DIR="${XDG_DATA_HOME}/zettelpy"

How to uninstall

There is no uninstaller, you just need to delete some directories, so to uninstall you need to delete the repo, the launcher, and the directory for storing the notes.

rm -rf ~/path/to/this/repo/Zettelpy
rm -r ~/zettelpy # This is the default location of the notes
rm ~/.local/bin/zet # This is the launcher

Dependencies

• Python 3.10
• To install this program and its dependencies you'll need pip
• A shell like bash or zsh
• To update the program you will need git

Usage:

Editing the notes

This project doesn't aim to be a note editor, so it will launch the note to whatever it is that you have set up in your $EDITOR in your shell, in my case it would be

export EDITOR='nvim'

Fleeting/Quick notes

You can use this mode which is the default mode to take quick notes.

zet

Create notes with a title or ID

Use quotes for names with spaces. You also need to be aware that if you specify an extension different from .md it will cause some problems because this project is intended to be used with markdown files, since it's just for notes.

zet "The Aleph"

You don't need to specify the extension but using "The Aleph.md" would also work

Delete notes

If you have decided that you want to delete the note that you are editing, just empty the file that you are in in vim/nvim it would be with :%d, the file and the row in the database will be deleted after you quit the file, this method and using the -d or --delete flag only work for permanent notes

How do you link the notes?

By the name of this repo you can tell that this program was made with the intention of being used for the zettelkasten method.

I decided to not include a native tool, and let the users choose and rely on an external tool of their choice, the first one or two attempts of making this project a usable tool was with the usage of ctags to link each file together, but now I'm personally using this this language server.

Flags

Access to the last edited/viewed note

You can use the --last or -l flag, which will search your last accessed note, this doesn't include quick notes, only permanent notes.

zet -l # Or --last

Print the path

Use --path or -p, this flag prints the path to the note, so you can pipe it or use it on command substitution for other programs to use, I use okular to view big markdown files, this will give you an idea of how to use it with other commands:

okular "$(zet 'The Aleph' -p)" & # Don't forget the double quotes
disown

TODO

1. Find a fast way of searching through the notes, adding an interactive mode might be needed
2. Create tools to fix errors introduced into the database, by adding a function/flag/way of checking the notes, to refresh the database.
3. Replace info automatically from the templates Make this dynamic by using different templates
4. Add something in the last_note file for the first time we run the program
5. Be able to delete temporary notes, I don't want to do this manually but it is for now
6. Filter flags, maybe even use ripgrep to search for stuff