11 ms·

Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method

195 points by pcr910303 6y ago

ggm 6y ago
My mother had a zettelkasten slide-cabinet. My father produced over 60,000 slides for her, over the course of their academic careers, by copying illustrations in art and architecture books (and by street photography on their many trips abroad) She could walk up to the slide cabinet, and ask "give me a theme" and we'd say "animals" and she'd say "give me a period" and we'd say "modern" and she'd select slides about the history of representative art about animals, in modern times. When she'd put the slides back, she could re-enter the cabinet and select slides about Michaelangelo and followers, or about the role of the pediment in architectural design, and select from the same slides, but for a different context. Amazing stuff. Totally indexed by herself, operated for a lifetime of academic teaching. I think she "invented" hypermedia in the 1960s basically.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lethologica 6y ago
  This is stunning. I've never heard of another example of an offline zettelkasten before other than the original. I would love to peruse it!
- maddyboo 6y ago
  Do you know what happened to it? That sounds amazing, I would love to see a video showing it off.
  - ggm 6y ago
    It was donated to the edinburgh college of art in the 1990s when she died. I suspect by now, its toast: The slide film process might be good for 50+ years if archival storage is used, but the university library probably had this out as a teaching resource before the web was big, and afterward, the digitization simply invited massive IPR complaints. Even the labour cost of separating out her own photos from the copies would have been massive. I know a lot of the mounted slides had 'newtons rings' which are signs of the medium touching the glass carrier, which is not net beneficial to the slide ageing well. I had a look in the catalog, It is not listed as available when her written work is, so I think its gone. The slides hung in sheets from suspensors, about 5 rows of eight columns per sheet. You would stand at the cabinet (it was a couple of 4 or 5 draw filing cabinet) with a normal projector carousel, and then select slides from the sheets. The sheets had keys like "french baroque architecture" or "corbusier" or "golden mean" or whatever to her was a primary collation key, and then she would use her own head to eyeball the slides and select the stuff by 'secondary key' given what she knew. I think the hyperthreading here is mostly notional the primary keying, was the sufficient vehicle to find anything given "I know I have a slide of this, it was when i was researching post modern industrial design in iron" and then she'd strike out into the stack... From 40x40x5 I get to more like 10,000 to 20,000 slides. I think you might get as many as 100 sheets to a drawer but even noting exaggeration it was a huge collection, wide ranging.
    - felixyz 6y ago
      Regardless, it would be fascinating if you ever found the time to write more about your mother's system, how she used it, how you experienced it, etc!
- reactspa 6y ago
  But if someone asked for a theme or period that wasn't pre-coded, it wouldn't work.
  - gegtik 6y ago
    thanks for sharing
  - ggm 6y ago
    Its true. You could do a talk on primitive art influence in modernist sculpture and find African tribal art, and cave painting from france so implicitly could do a talk on African tribal art, but without reference to south America or Asia or Inuit art, it was plainly incapable of doing a wide ranging talk on folk art in pre modern times. You could do a talk on images of x in medium y, but only indirectly do a talk on x itself and no context not captured in images of x in medium y. Thats a fundamental limit. If however there was no index to x in y, it relied on personal knowledge x in y existed. So there was a lot of path casting inside her head, to recall states to determine if the effort of an exhaustive search was justified. Isn't that true of any pre index scheme?
- mkipper 6y ago
  Maybe she was inspired by Vannevar Bush's Memex concept?
  - ggm 6y ago
    Maybe she was. We used to talk sometimes about the value of a library catalogue as a research tool, and she'd worked in publishing so the concept of an index as a key value store was pretty apparent. The memex talk is maybe a stretch?
Natales 6y ago
For having been around for so long in its most basic form, it's pretty exciting to see an entire renascence of knowledge tools and methodologies. Every few years I get bitten by the bug and I go on a hunt of what's out there. Most recently, some colleagues were very excited about Roam Research [0], so I took another look, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that, among many great tools, the good old TittlyWiki [1] had evolved with the times, and now you have "distributions" tailored to apply the Zettelkasten methodologies. I settled on Drift [2], and over a weekend, I moved hundreds of notes I had spread in several formats over to a small set of Drift files. I even moved my entire personal web site (mostly audio and foodie geeky stuff) into it, with close to 80 tiddlers by now [3]. Porting was phase 1. The fun part where the methodology becomes really powerful, is breaking down the monoliths, just like you would do with app modernization into microservices. Taking longer blog posts and decomposing them into discrete, reusable components that can hold meaning under different contexts. The more I looked at them, the more I could find I could break them down into more discrete ideas. And I'm sure I'm not done. Several weeks into it, I've become more organized than I had been in years, and I realize it helps me structure my thinking, and how to connect ideas. Regardless of what tool you choose (and there are plenty) it's a great moment to look at what this methodology can do for you. [0] https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/ [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ [2] https://akhater.github.io/drift/ https://akhater.github.io/drift/ [3] https://ramirosalas.com https://ramirosalas.com
- Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
  For any readers looking for a slick, local-first app, I've really enjoyed using Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
  - lethologica 6y ago
    I can highly recommend Obsidian. I avoided Roam due to it being yet another cloud based platform (unless that has changed since it first came out?) My knowledge base is far, far too valuable to have it go up in smoke if the company ever collapses. I'm very much loving Obsidian. It just gets out of my way and lets me write.
throwawayamzn1 6y ago
This again :) my five minute solution is to just have a “master learning log” which is just a glorified single google doc outline..
- Jorge1o1 6y ago
  I have notes.org (emacs org mode) which contain basically all of my notes ever written. Sure the org mode collapse thing is fine but the killer feature is being able to grep all of my notes in milliseconds.
  - dmortin 6y ago
    org-rifle may be better for searching org notes, because it searches for multiple words occuring in individual notes which is more efficient than simple line-base grepping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24916536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24916536
    - githubalphapapa 6y ago
      Please see also org-ql, which mostly obsoletes org-rifle and is much faster as well.
  - telotortium 6y ago
    How do you use that day to day? I also use Org, but it has slowed down quite a bit for me. Perhaps one of my files is too big, and I also use the agenda, which takes at least a few seconds to regenerate.
CGamesPlay 6y ago
This is your friendly reminder to avoid the productivity hacking tarpit. It feels productive to think about productivity but oftentimes you're confusing movement for progress. I'll give two specific pieces of advice for people who are thinking about switching from methodology / app A to methodology / app B. 1. You might find something that B does that is just so difficult to accomplish in A, so you want to switch. But before you do, you should spend a week living with the difficult path to do that thing in A. You will likely find that learning the muscle memory to do that thing in A was actually the difficult part, and once you've overcome that hurdle it isn't difficult any more. 2. You might switch to B and feel that "now, everything is so organized!" However, it's very likely that you could have "switched" from A to A and you'd feel the same way. What I mean by this is that by switching, you've forced yourself to revisit all of your notes. If you forced yourself to revisit your notes without switching, you'd see the same effect.
- hardwaregeek 6y ago
  With anything productivity related there's an intense honeymoon period where it seems like you've found the magical productivity elixir. In reality, you're just high on placebo. It's far too easy to chase that high from app to app, method to method.
  - sidpatil 6y ago
    > It's far too easy to chase that high from app to app, method to method. Likewise for languages and frameworks.
- ibn_khaldun 6y ago
  This, this is the post to read. It is indeed a tarpit that traps people who mean well and legitimately want to Get Things Done. The knowledge work/"second brain" community will have you convinced that everyone who you run into online is a PhD candidate. The irony is that a lot of people intend to "simplify" their workflow but end up reaching for more things to pile onto it. The breaking point for me was the first time I loaded Obsidian. It is a nice program but it incentifies Doing Too Much, at least for my taste. Granted, what influences a person to even care about how they take notes varies. The chaps over at Zettelkasten.de actually advocate for a very simple approach to note taking that can work anywhere. Personally, I've found that it's best for me to do the bulk of my work in a Plain Text environment -- plain like the text box that I am using to type this comment plain. Alhamdulillah.
maddyboo 6y ago
Neuron [1] is an exciting new Zettelkasten project. In short, it’s a CLI tool that transforms a directory of markdown files with some special syntax into a static site. A couple of highlights: It’s got support for tags, links, backlinks; it can generate trees of links to notes matching a given tag; the static site has search functionality; there are editor plugins for vim and Emacs. The CLI has the ability to output your entire Zettelkasten graph as JSON, which you can then parse and use to write scripts. I’ve already used this feature to write a few tools for myself that greatly improve my note taking workflow. Behind the scenes, Neuron uses Pandoc to convert the markdown into HTML. There is talk of a feature that would allow the user to write Pandoc filters which would essentially be programs that transform the Neuron AST prior to it being rendered with Pandoc. Such a feature would open up tons of opportunities for customization, e.g. you could write rules to parse custom syntax in your markdown files and generate inline HTML. I’ve already written a tool that does something similar [2] without the use of a Pandoc filter by operating directly on the generated HTML files, but a Pandoc filter would greatly improve the process. All of your notes are simply markdown files stored on your local machine, so you’re free to do whatever you’d like with them: store them in git, write scripts to generate them, whatever. The author is simultaneously developing Cerveau [3] which is a hosted web interface that allows you to edit your notes remotely via a web browser. It transparently syncs your edits to a GitHub repository. Unfortunately, Cerveau is currently closed source, but I believe the author has expressed interest in opening it up if he’s able to get enough GitHub sponsors to sustain its development. If it matters to you, Neuron is written in Haskell and the project makes heavy use of Nix. 1: https://github.com/srid/neuron https://github.com/srid/neuron 2: https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/228#issuecomment-670290253 https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/228#issuecomment-67029... 3: https://www.cerveau.app https://www.cerveau.app
- bergie 6y ago
  Sounds like that would work pretty well with this mobile markdown-based notes app I'm using: https://gitjournal.io/ https://gitjournal.io/
bravura 6y ago
For an academic zettelkasten that involves references and citations, are there any tools with good support for bibtex (or DOI references in general)?
- kornish 6y ago
  Emacs, I'd imagine. (the same statement goes for Emacs and most anything, though) :)
- CryingSofa 6y ago
  Zettlr is a Zettelkasten tool that has great bibtex and Zotero integration [1]. [1] https://docs.zettlr.com/en/academic/citations/ https://docs.zettlr.com/en/academic/citations/
- ssijak 6y ago
  DEVONthink?
- AJRF 6y ago
  org-roam with org-bibtex 1. https://www.orgroam.com/ https://www.orgroam.com/ 2. http://gewhere.github.io/org-bibtex http://gewhere.github.io/org-bibtex
  - auroranil 6y ago
    You can also use org-roam-bibtex: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex
ryanar 6y ago
A Zettelkasten tool built on VS Code: Foam https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
notainc 6y ago
If, as the top post wisely indicates, you are in search of results and real impact you should carefully consider which app really helps you get things done. Lots of hype and lots of features in an app is a recipe for lots of wasted time. For making a zettelkasten with the minimum of hassle and friction check out https://scrapbox.io https://scrapbox.io
maxrobot 6y ago
If I see this on the front page of HN once more... I'll... I'll...
- wumms 6y ago
  ... click <hide>.
mr-karan 6y ago
Hacked up a simple CLI tool to create and organize notes using Markdown files and publish that as a static website. The idea is very much inspired from Neuron - but a few differences: - In zettel we have a concept of Connections and not uplinks/backlinks. This lets us have circular links across notes. - For visualisation we use Graph structure instead a of a Tree. For reasons mentioned above. zettel is a simple CLI written in Go, so very easy to just grab the binary and get started. The project is in a nascent stage, feature requests or any relevant ideas are more than welcome! Our GitHub Repo: https://github.com/hackstream/zettel https://github.com/hackstream/zettel Documentation: https://zettel.hackstream.dev/ https://zettel.hackstream.dev/ (Yes the docs are generated by zettel as well)
- pnathan 6y ago
  I like the idea.
ricg 6y ago
I'm working on a Zettelkasten app myself at the moment. Backlinks and tags are working. Rather than using solely a time based ID like "202006110955", I'm adding the date to the file name. Links then show the file name instead of the id (e.g 2020-10-29 lessons learned.html → [[lessons learned]]). Also working on ways to surface information from the Zettelkasten like a spreadsheet view and generated one-page summaries. Quick demo here: https://youtu.be/hf2s8fZsojY https://youtu.be/hf2s8fZsojY
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Sounds cool, though I've seen this on hacker news several times already. But this kind of regimental organisation would never work for me. I don't have the patience. For me organising means putting all my stuff on the desktop, which then goes in a folder "Old Desktop" when my desktop becomes so full that I can't add more files to it :'). It's become a nested chain of old desktops over the years. Yet I never seen to have issues finding even old stuff back. In fact it's surprisingly effortless, somehow. When I navigate it, it feels like walking through an old neighbourhood I use to live in but haven't visited in a while. Same with my notes mess in OneNote. For some reason it makes sense to my brain. I've been trying different organisation methods in the past but they never stuck. It was a lot of work and didn't really make retrieval easier because it was never that hard for me to begin with. So I'm taking that as a sign this lack of organisation is good enough for me :)
0xbadf00d 6y ago
So there does seem to be a recent Hype-train around improved note taking and Zettelkasten in particular. I would 100% echo the timesink/tarpit comments insofar as unless you have a specific learning or knowledge management goal devoting time to this can be a fun procrastination game. Many of the sources rate the book "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens as a starting point (ISBN10 1542866502 , ISBN13 9781542866507) There are a plethora of youtube channels and Productivity websites to be found so YMMV, I liked: Bryan Jenks' - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5fd4SsfvECy0zzf8Cyo20ZoipEt6YeL3 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5fd4SsfvECy0zzf8Cyo2... Justin (Effective Remote work )- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkzyo69rqBoBJUyQ9jo53Bw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkzyo69rqBoBJUyQ9jo53Bw/vid...
- justindirose 6y ago
  Wow, thanks for the mention of my channel (Effective Remote Work). Glad you're liking the videos!
- pedro1976 6y ago
  There is a podcast on "How to take smart notes", if you prefer to listen https://bookworm.fm/68/ https://bookworm.fm/68/
kenty 6y ago
can we agree to stop upvoting these posts please? This has been topping HN for like each month for the last year.
Niksko 6y ago
I know about Baader-Meinhoff, but did something happen recently to lead to some sort of resurgence of zettelkasten interest? I feel like I learned about the term a few months ago on HN, and then it's been cropping up quite frequently since. It's a pretty distinctive word, I feel as if I would have noticed and investigated if it had come up so frequently in the past.
enter-haken 6y ago
I tried something with elixir, markdown, graphviz and feh. https://github.com/enter-haken/memories https://github.com/enter-haken/memories Currently I add my thoughts manually. I'm still trying to find out if it has a significant advantage over classic note taking methods.

195 points by pcr910303 6y ago

ggm 6y ago

My mother had a zettelkasten slide-cabinet. My father produced over 60,000 slides for her, over the course of their academic careers, by copying illustrations in art and architecture books (and by street photography on their many trips abroad) She could walk up to the slide cabinet, and ask "give me a theme" and we'd say "animals" and she'd say "give me a period" and we'd say "modern" and she'd select slides about the history of representative art about animals, in modern times. When she'd put the slides back, she could re-enter the cabinet and select slides about Michaelangelo and followers, or about the role of the pediment in architectural design, and select from the same slides, but for a different context. Amazing stuff. Totally indexed by herself, operated for a lifetime of academic teaching. I think she "invented" hypermedia in the 1960s basically.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lethologica 6y ago
This is stunning. I've never heard of another example of an offline zettelkasten before other than the original. I would love to peruse it!
maddyboo 6y ago
Do you know what happened to it? That sounds amazing, I would love to see a video showing it off.
- ggm 6y ago
  It was donated to the edinburgh college of art in the 1990s when she died. I suspect by now, its toast: The slide film process might be good for 50+ years if archival storage is used, but the university library probably had this out as a teaching resource before the web was big, and afterward, the digitization simply invited massive IPR complaints. Even the labour cost of separating out her own photos from the copies would have been massive. I know a lot of the mounted slides had 'newtons rings' which are signs of the medium touching the glass carrier, which is not net beneficial to the slide ageing well. I had a look in the catalog, It is not listed as available when her written work is, so I think its gone. The slides hung in sheets from suspensors, about 5 rows of eight columns per sheet. You would stand at the cabinet (it was a couple of 4 or 5 draw filing cabinet) with a normal projector carousel, and then select slides from the sheets. The sheets had keys like "french baroque architecture" or "corbusier" or "golden mean" or whatever to her was a primary collation key, and then she would use her own head to eyeball the slides and select the stuff by 'secondary key' given what she knew. I think the hyperthreading here is mostly notional the primary keying, was the sufficient vehicle to find anything given "I know I have a slide of this, it was when i was researching post modern industrial design in iron" and then she'd strike out into the stack... From 40x40x5 I get to more like 10,000 to 20,000 slides. I think you might get as many as 100 sheets to a drawer but even noting exaggeration it was a huge collection, wide ranging.
  - felixyz 6y ago
    Regardless, it would be fascinating if you ever found the time to write more about your mother's system, how she used it, how you experienced it, etc!
reactspa 6y ago
But if someone asked for a theme or period that wasn't pre-coded, it wouldn't work.
- gegtik 6y ago
  thanks for sharing
- ggm 6y ago
  Its true. You could do a talk on primitive art influence in modernist sculpture and find African tribal art, and cave painting from france so implicitly could do a talk on African tribal art, but without reference to south America or Asia or Inuit art, it was plainly incapable of doing a wide ranging talk on folk art in pre modern times. You could do a talk on images of x in medium y, but only indirectly do a talk on x itself and no context not captured in images of x in medium y. Thats a fundamental limit. If however there was no index to x in y, it relied on personal knowledge x in y existed. So there was a lot of path casting inside her head, to recall states to determine if the effort of an exhaustive search was justified. Isn't that true of any pre index scheme?
mkipper 6y ago
Maybe she was inspired by Vannevar Bush's Memex concept?
- ggm 6y ago
  Maybe she was. We used to talk sometimes about the value of a library catalogue as a research tool, and she'd worked in publishing so the concept of an index as a key value store was pretty apparent. The memex talk is maybe a stretch?

Natales 6y ago

For having been around for so long in its most basic form, it's pretty exciting to see an entire renascence of knowledge tools and methodologies. Every few years I get bitten by the bug and I go on a hunt of what's out there. Most recently, some colleagues were very excited about Roam Research [0], so I took another look, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that, among many great tools, the good old TittlyWiki [1] had evolved with the times, and now you have "distributions" tailored to apply the Zettelkasten methodologies. I settled on Drift [2], and over a weekend, I moved hundreds of notes I had spread in several formats over to a small set of Drift files. I even moved my entire personal web site (mostly audio and foodie geeky stuff) into it, with close to 80 tiddlers by now [3]. Porting was phase 1. The fun part where the methodology becomes really powerful, is breaking down the monoliths, just like you would do with app modernization into microservices. Taking longer blog posts and decomposing them into discrete, reusable components that can hold meaning under different contexts. The more I looked at them, the more I could find I could break them down into more discrete ideas. And I'm sure I'm not done. Several weeks into it, I've become more organized than I had been in years, and I realize it helps me structure my thinking, and how to connect ideas. Regardless of what tool you choose (and there are plenty) it's a great moment to look at what this methodology can do for you. [0] https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/ [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ [2] https://akhater.github.io/drift/ https://akhater.github.io/drift/ [3] https://ramirosalas.com https://ramirosalas.com

Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
For any readers looking for a slick, local-first app, I've really enjoyed using Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
- lethologica 6y ago
  I can highly recommend Obsidian. I avoided Roam due to it being yet another cloud based platform (unless that has changed since it first came out?) My knowledge base is far, far too valuable to have it go up in smoke if the company ever collapses. I'm very much loving Obsidian. It just gets out of my way and lets me write.

throwawayamzn1 6y ago

This again :) my five minute solution is to just have a “master learning log” which is just a glorified single google doc outline..

Jorge1o1 6y ago
I have notes.org (emacs org mode) which contain basically all of my notes ever written. Sure the org mode collapse thing is fine but the killer feature is being able to grep all of my notes in milliseconds.
- dmortin 6y ago
  org-rifle may be better for searching org notes, because it searches for multiple words occuring in individual notes which is more efficient than simple line-base grepping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24916536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24916536
  - githubalphapapa 6y ago
    Please see also org-ql, which mostly obsoletes org-rifle and is much faster as well.
- telotortium 6y ago
  How do you use that day to day? I also use Org, but it has slowed down quite a bit for me. Perhaps one of my files is too big, and I also use the agenda, which takes at least a few seconds to regenerate.

CGamesPlay 6y ago

This is your friendly reminder to avoid the productivity hacking tarpit. It feels productive to think about productivity but oftentimes you're confusing movement for progress. I'll give two specific pieces of advice for people who are thinking about switching from methodology / app A to methodology / app B. 1. You might find something that B does that is just so difficult to accomplish in A, so you want to switch. But before you do, you should spend a week living with the difficult path to do that thing in A. You will likely find that learning the muscle memory to do that thing in A was actually the difficult part, and once you've overcome that hurdle it isn't difficult any more. 2. You might switch to B and feel that "now, everything is so organized!" However, it's very likely that you could have "switched" from A to A and you'd feel the same way. What I mean by this is that by switching, you've forced yourself to revisit all of your notes. If you forced yourself to revisit your notes without switching, you'd see the same effect.

hardwaregeek 6y ago
With anything productivity related there's an intense honeymoon period where it seems like you've found the magical productivity elixir. In reality, you're just high on placebo. It's far too easy to chase that high from app to app, method to method.
- sidpatil 6y ago
  > It's far too easy to chase that high from app to app, method to method. Likewise for languages and frameworks.
ibn_khaldun 6y ago
This, this is the post to read. It is indeed a tarpit that traps people who mean well and legitimately want to Get Things Done. The knowledge work/"second brain" community will have you convinced that everyone who you run into online is a PhD candidate. The irony is that a lot of people intend to "simplify" their workflow but end up reaching for more things to pile onto it. The breaking point for me was the first time I loaded Obsidian. It is a nice program but it incentifies Doing Too Much, at least for my taste. Granted, what influences a person to even care about how they take notes varies. The chaps over at Zettelkasten.de actually advocate for a very simple approach to note taking that can work anywhere. Personally, I've found that it's best for me to do the bulk of my work in a Plain Text environment -- plain like the text box that I am using to type this comment plain. Alhamdulillah.

maddyboo 6y ago

Neuron [1] is an exciting new Zettelkasten project. In short, it’s a CLI tool that transforms a directory of markdown files with some special syntax into a static site. A couple of highlights: It’s got support for tags, links, backlinks; it can generate trees of links to notes matching a given tag; the static site has search functionality; there are editor plugins for vim and Emacs. The CLI has the ability to output your entire Zettelkasten graph as JSON, which you can then parse and use to write scripts. I’ve already used this feature to write a few tools for myself that greatly improve my note taking workflow. Behind the scenes, Neuron uses Pandoc to convert the markdown into HTML. There is talk of a feature that would allow the user to write Pandoc filters which would essentially be programs that transform the Neuron AST prior to it being rendered with Pandoc. Such a feature would open up tons of opportunities for customization, e.g. you could write rules to parse custom syntax in your markdown files and generate inline HTML. I’ve already written a tool that does something similar [2] without the use of a Pandoc filter by operating directly on the generated HTML files, but a Pandoc filter would greatly improve the process. All of your notes are simply markdown files stored on your local machine, so you’re free to do whatever you’d like with them: store them in git, write scripts to generate them, whatever. The author is simultaneously developing Cerveau [3] which is a hosted web interface that allows you to edit your notes remotely via a web browser. It transparently syncs your edits to a GitHub repository. Unfortunately, Cerveau is currently closed source, but I believe the author has expressed interest in opening it up if he’s able to get enough GitHub sponsors to sustain its development. If it matters to you, Neuron is written in Haskell and the project makes heavy use of Nix. 1: https://github.com/srid/neuron https://github.com/srid/neuron 2: https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/228#issuecomment-670290253 https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/228#issuecomment-67029... 3: https://www.cerveau.app https://www.cerveau.app

bergie 6y ago
Sounds like that would work pretty well with this mobile markdown-based notes app I'm using: https://gitjournal.io/ https://gitjournal.io/

bravura 6y ago

For an academic zettelkasten that involves references and citations, are there any tools with good support for bibtex (or DOI references in general)?

kornish 6y ago
Emacs, I'd imagine. (the same statement goes for Emacs and most anything, though) :)
CryingSofa 6y ago
Zettlr is a Zettelkasten tool that has great bibtex and Zotero integration [1]. [1] https://docs.zettlr.com/en/academic/citations/ https://docs.zettlr.com/en/academic/citations/
ssijak 6y ago
DEVONthink?
AJRF 6y ago
org-roam with org-bibtex 1. https://www.orgroam.com/ https://www.orgroam.com/ 2. http://gewhere.github.io/org-bibtex http://gewhere.github.io/org-bibtex
- auroranil 6y ago
  You can also use org-roam-bibtex: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex

ryanar 6y ago

A Zettelkasten tool built on VS Code: Foam https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

notainc 6y ago

If, as the top post wisely indicates, you are in search of results and real impact you should carefully consider which app really helps you get things done. Lots of hype and lots of features in an app is a recipe for lots of wasted time. For making a zettelkasten with the minimum of hassle and friction check out https://scrapbox.io https://scrapbox.io

maxrobot 6y ago

If I see this on the front page of HN once more... I'll... I'll...

wumms 6y ago
... click <hide>.

mr-karan 6y ago

Hacked up a simple CLI tool to create and organize notes using Markdown files and publish that as a static website. The idea is very much inspired from Neuron - but a few differences: - In zettel we have a concept of Connections and not uplinks/backlinks. This lets us have circular links across notes. - For visualisation we use Graph structure instead a of a Tree. For reasons mentioned above. zettel is a simple CLI written in Go, so very easy to just grab the binary and get started. The project is in a nascent stage, feature requests or any relevant ideas are more than welcome! Our GitHub Repo: https://github.com/hackstream/zettel https://github.com/hackstream/zettel Documentation: https://zettel.hackstream.dev/ https://zettel.hackstream.dev/ (Yes the docs are generated by zettel as well)

pnathan 6y ago
I like the idea.

ricg 6y ago

I'm working on a Zettelkasten app myself at the moment. Backlinks and tags are working. Rather than using solely a time based ID like "202006110955", I'm adding the date to the file name. Links then show the file name instead of the id (e.g 2020-10-29 lessons learned.html → [[lessons learned]]). Also working on ways to surface information from the Zettelkasten like a spreadsheet view and generated one-page summaries. Quick demo here: https://youtu.be/hf2s8fZsojY https://youtu.be/hf2s8fZsojY

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Sounds cool, though I've seen this on hacker news several times already. But this kind of regimental organisation would never work for me. I don't have the patience. For me organising means putting all my stuff on the desktop, which then goes in a folder "Old Desktop" when my desktop becomes so full that I can't add more files to it :'). It's become a nested chain of old desktops over the years. Yet I never seen to have issues finding even old stuff back. In fact it's surprisingly effortless, somehow. When I navigate it, it feels like walking through an old neighbourhood I use to live in but haven't visited in a while. Same with my notes mess in OneNote. For some reason it makes sense to my brain. I've been trying different organisation methods in the past but they never stuck. It was a lot of work and didn't really make retrieval easier because it was never that hard for me to begin with. So I'm taking that as a sign this lack of organisation is good enough for me :)

0xbadf00d 6y ago

So there does seem to be a recent Hype-train around improved note taking and Zettelkasten in particular. I would 100% echo the timesink/tarpit comments insofar as unless you have a specific learning or knowledge management goal devoting time to this can be a fun procrastination game. Many of the sources rate the book "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens as a starting point (ISBN10 1542866502 , ISBN13 9781542866507) There are a plethora of youtube channels and Productivity websites to be found so YMMV, I liked: Bryan Jenks' - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5fd4SsfvECy0zzf8Cyo20ZoipEt6YeL3 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5fd4SsfvECy0zzf8Cyo2... Justin (Effective Remote work )- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkzyo69rqBoBJUyQ9jo53Bw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkzyo69rqBoBJUyQ9jo53Bw/vid...

justindirose 6y ago
Wow, thanks for the mention of my channel (Effective Remote Work). Glad you're liking the videos!
pedro1976 6y ago
There is a podcast on "How to take smart notes", if you prefer to listen https://bookworm.fm/68/ https://bookworm.fm/68/

kenty 6y ago

can we agree to stop upvoting these posts please? This has been topping HN for like each month for the last year.

Niksko 6y ago

I know about Baader-Meinhoff, but did something happen recently to lead to some sort of resurgence of zettelkasten interest? I feel like I learned about the term a few months ago on HN, and then it's been cropping up quite frequently since. It's a pretty distinctive word, I feel as if I would have noticed and investigated if it had come up so frequently in the past.

enter-haken 6y ago

I tried something with elixir, markdown, graphviz and feh. https://github.com/enter-haken/memories https://github.com/enter-haken/memories Currently I add my thoughts manually. I'm still trying to find out if it has a significant advantage over classic note taking methods.