• noteexplorer

  4 21 1.1 Rust

  NoteExplorer is a CLI tool to help organizing your stack of (wiki-)linked Markdown notes.

Now, all your links will look something like this [[]] . This is hard to read and a bit cumbersome, so here's how I style it (again, very subjective):

1. I use italics for the title after the link. This makes it stand out more in text and clearly delimits the extend of the title in texts.
2. I use the following custom CSS to shrink the [[]] part down to [[↗]] until you hover over it. You can still click it, but it renders much less obtrusively. The whole thing is sort of an ugly workaround, and I would love to get more options for this in Zettlr itself (also being able to link to different sections and maybe make annotated wikilinks), but this is the best I could find for now.

​

#editor .cm-zkn-link:not(:hover),
body.dark #editor .cm-zkn-link:not(:hover) {
    font-size: .01em;
    visibility: hidden;
}
#editor .cm-zkn-link:not(:hover)::after,
body.dark #editor .cm-zkn-link:not(:hover)::after {
    font-size: 100em;
    content: '↗';
    visibility: visible;
}

With this, a Zettel might look something like this:

https://preview.redd.it/csctr6s2rda71.png?width=1010&format=png&auto=webp&s=9106322d5ced20c6921466c52136b48468b7f75e

backlinks and graph analysis

A much-requested feature is backlinks (links from a Zettel to all places that link to it). Zettlr hasn't implemented this yet, so I'm using the note-explorer script by C. Daven to insert them. Every once in a while, I run

noteexplorer -b "___" ..\ update-backlinks

to generate backlinks for all files. I modified it to use ___ as the delimiter of the backlink section, but anything should work.

I also use the script to check for "floating" Zettel (i.e. with no link going in or out, thus not connected to the rest of the Zettelkasten) and modified it to update the filenames based on the YAML title as specified above.

This still doesn't give you the full graph experience, but it's good enough.

tags

While tags are a nice feature, I don't really think they are necessary for a Zettelkasten – or all that useful. In a text, if you want to mention an overarching or related topic, you should really link to a Zettl about it. The only place where I think they could be useful in the content of a Zettel is when you want to link to something you haven't created a Zettel for yet. As Zettlr sadly doesn't allow linking to placeholders, you can use tags to keep track of what topics you might want to open a Zettel to later on and then insert links to it when you've actually written it. However, even in this instance, it might be better to just link to an empty Zettel instead.

Where tags really are useful is metainformation. Using tags for meta info allows you to quickly find Zettel independent of their relationship established by links and their content. I use this to e.g. collect all Zettel that belong to a certain lecture for reviewing, or to mark all Zettel that needs an overhaul. Conveniently, you can include these tags as keywords in the YAML-header, where there nicely separated from the content of the Zettel and are immediately showing you what meta-information this Zettel has (you can see that in the image above).

lookout

That's it! That's how I implement my Zettelkasten. Feel free to ask questions if anything is unclear, or offer suggestions from your experience.

Also, I implemented a python script that extracts marked paragraphs from Zettel as Anki flashcards, which is really handy to study lectures with. If anyone is interested, I might share that in the future.

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