Zettelkasten.de

I personally use literate programming to maintain my "dotfiles", mainly NixOS [1], and I _love_ it. I like to describe all possible alternative tools, why I don't use them, possible tools that look nice, random ideas and blog posts that describe parts of my config, add TODOs and screenshots, ... in short everything that is really ugly to do inside source code comments. Also I gain structure; adding headings to a 3000 LOC config is very nice. For tangling I use lmt [2], as it works with Markdown and also play nice with Emanote [3] (full syntax highlighting inside the code blocks.). That means all my "dotfiles" are inside my Zettelkasten [4] and can be navigated like any other note I have. [1]: https://nixos.org/ [2]: https://github.com/driusan/lmt [3]: https://github.com/srid/emanote [4]: https://zettelkasten.de/

I have switched to Obsidian and I use multiple vaults for multiple purposes. One is for work, one is for personal projects and notes. One for Books and Movies I watched or want to watch. And one for Zettelkasten[0]. Obsidian is extremely customizable and user-friendly. And to make things even better, which is a must for many people including me, it saves the files as .md in the local storage. You can even sync it among n devices for free using Box, Sync, Mega, OneDrive, Dropbox or whatever floats your boat. Just as a quick exercise, I spun up a fully functional Obsidian clone that runs in the browser that works locally, in four hours using React- just in case the company goes under in future. It works great. [0]: https://zettelkasten.de

I've been using this with the Zettelkasten[0] method for a few months and love it. The keyboard shortcuts are really powerful and the UI is great. [0] - https://zettelkasten.de/

The best description I've found of it is this article: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-met… Slightly long, but it completely describes how they work and how to implement them practically (on notecards). On the other hand, the articles on https://zettelkasten.de are pretty difficult to understand for the uninitiated.

I used to love this program. Alas, it is very out-of-date. The best alternative I've yet found is The Archive: https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

I have read a bit about Zettelkasten and watched a video explaining it, and to me it feels like a pretty random collection of mostly good ideas on organizing information. Right up there with drinking coffee on exactly two specific days per week... https://zettelkasten.de/posts/practical-integration-deep-work/ I think this stuff is esoteric and personal enough that we are under no obligation to follow it to the letter.

I can't recommend the Zettlekasten Method enough: https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/ You can do it with index cards or you can use software to practice the method and grow your note collection. I now prefer Zettlr (https://www.zettlr.com) after using Joplin (https://joplinapp.org), which are both FOSS. One of the core strategies of the Zettlekasten Method is to link notes to each other. That's how knowledge grows: connections and synthesis (internalization/application of the connections) Here's a 3-year-old video on the method that serves as a good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFZHuWLA09M

The zettelkasten site and forum: https://zettelkasten.de The book "How to build a second brain" by Tiago Forte. Andy Matuschak's site: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes The Garden movement (it is the motivation) How to take smart notes by Ahrens And a lot of research and trying stuff. Now, I outline stuff while I'm reading (the good books) explaining stuff as I would to another person. Then I do a synthesis by grouping related stuff together, adding them to previous notes and creating new ones. Then I link these groups together, as everything is related, and you can find the links if you're curious enough.

https://zettelkasten.de/ via https://orgmode.org/ and https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

Have a look at the German software 'The Archive' https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive , this might be what you are looking for. It is not overloaded with fancy features and is text/markdown based. Enables you to focus on your actual notes and ideas and how to connect and inter-act with them, instead of getting lost in fancy diagrams. Their user forum is in English and is THE best ressource regarding all things Zettelkasten. https://forum.zettelkasten.de Niklas Luhmann, the inventor of the Zettelkasten system, was German, after all :)

Best note taking I’ve done is just rubber-ducking to myself in a (public) slack channel solely for that purpose. Never worry about hierarchies, and easily link back to past messages. For a dedicated app and methodology, I find https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ mimics that style.

This looks like a very early-stage rediscovery of the zettelkast note-taking technique. I'd recommend reading up on it more, if you are interested in taking atomic notes, organizing them, and building connections among notes to discover connections over time. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

Reminds me of https://zettelkasten.de/ except they focus on note-taking while you have some emphasis on reading as well.

Also worth checking out is The Archive. There are some differences, but I've been very happy with it as a successor. https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

I personally found the archive[0] an excellent software to get started with a Zettelkasten. The forum and the blog posts on the site are great. I'm also developing a CLI script to visualize your zettelkasten[1]. I mainly use it to print stats, like the number of connected components and find orphaned notes. [0] https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ [1] https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel

i found the following useful when i was getting started: https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook/dp/B06WVY… https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-met…

I started practicing Zettelkasten recently, using The Archive[1]. I already had a pretty large collection of less-structured notes from nvALT, and I love how the new "rules" really help to shape my new notes. I'm converting old notes as I have the time and need. I was initially skeptical of the idea of timestamping notes in the filename, but I find it counterintuitively useful, and The Archive has really good support for it w/ the Cmd-U shortcut. The Archive also has multiple tabs, which help immensely over nvALT's single pane. [1]: https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

I am more and more reluctant to use any note taking app. Ideally, notes I take on the book I am reading today should still be available to me in 20 years. No app can offer that kind of guarantee. I switched to using plaintext files, and do not look back. The only thing one needs is to have a clear workflow to make sure notes remain accessible and useful. I like the Zettelkasten method for this (see eg https://zettelkasten.de, no affiliation). Not to criticize this app in particular, I actually quite like the concepts listed (which remind me of the Zettelkasten idea). Just the whole idea of keeping my thoughts in an app. Even if it does allow to export the data, it is probably in a format that is difficult to use outside of the app, and thus close to useless.

I like plain text backed in google drive. I use The Archive [0] but Notational Velocity [1] is popular as well. I don't have a bookmark system though. This book is an excellent explanation of a plain text knowledge base system [2]. [0] https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ [1] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1542866502/

The people from the blog he links (that I'm in the process of reading) wrote an application for macOS that reminds me of notational velocity in spirit but that has been made specifically for Zettelkasten and should be able to handle even huge amounts of notes (stored in plain text, the best format in my opinion, portable and all that): https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

I like these apps because I’ve been trying note taking for 30 years and have had many false starts of solo projects over the years. So when someone releases it makes me a little happy. I like markdown because the interoperability is high. I’d like a command line way to just create a new note in one line that gets stuck somewhere that can be added on or moved around later (eg, “note Inkdrop should be investigated and forked later on #notes #hn #app”). My problem is that phones are just too slow for me to fire up and start a note so I tend to wait and forget before I can write down. I’ve seen a lot of approaches to digital zettelkasten [0], but the UX requires a lot of familiarity that lead me back to eventually (not) writing my own. [0] https://zettelkasten.de/

I use NVAlt with a quite complex tagging method. All in all, I guess you could say that it is a Zettelkasten notebook. [1] [1]https://zettelkasten.de/

Keep trying. Try different methods. What works for me debugging and refactoring distributed systems may not work for you. The thing I tend to drive toward is a single page mind-map-like artifact that is monotonically increasing in density with a focus on system-of-record and data flow. I tend to keep notes about individual tech and important systems in whatever tools are handy, either locally or in a form that are accessible to the team. Often this takes the form of a JIRA page per topic, or an nvAlt note per topic. Tickets aren't great for this because they are ephemeral. These notes are where code snippets, error messages, anything searchable, go. I have something like the Zettlekasten[1] method in the back of my mind when deciding on scope of these support notes. However I may also start from a simple local text file, not committed to the repository, or even attached as a note to a ticket or other ephemeral trigger. But the thing that ties it all together, for me, is that mind map. Once I have that I can truly reason about the system. 1 - https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/

I'd say that most of the distinction between books and blogs / other online writing is about the process and result rather than of the physical form of the product itself, though that has some bearing (see my recent comments elsewhere in this thread). If you're familiar with the literature on writing itself --- fiction or nonfiction --- what becomes clear is how books are crafted. There's the idea, often research, organisation of notes and the like, writing itself, and then very often many, many, many rounds of editing and proofing, which go towards a result which ideally reads well, is factually accurate (where such things matter), that educational materials follow good pedagogy, is well cited and referenced, has needless fat trimmed, etc., etc. Traditional publishing has multiple edit and filter points, from initial acquisition through revisions and translations. The upside is (potentially) well-crafted works, the downside is that many proposals don't get green-lit. The promise of the Web was breaking that editorial chokepoint, which has its own pros and cons. Yes, of course it's possible to craft bad books, and as The Good Book notes, there is no end. But blogging and article-writing frequently cuts many of these corners. Yes, a domain-expert can write a good blog, and yes, the process of blogging itself can be part of the process of book-creation, with feedback and corrections to the (error-prone, roughly-hewn) blog posts itself contributing to that finished…

I'm dealing with the same issue actively. My latest attempt involves the article https://zettelkasten.de/posts/knowledge-cycle-efficiently-organize-wri… I have a gazillion tabs open, and I try to work through my tabs once a day to see what I can delete without losing information I want to keep and what I think is valuable enough to add to my notes in some way. I'll look for a note that already covers the idea and add the URL and a quick summary. If a note doesn't exist, I'll add the core idea that interested me about it as a new note with the idea(s) summarized in my own words (maybe 1-3 sentences), then a reference in that note to the URL. I also try to summarize the link from memory instead of reading through it again. I'll only check the link's contents if I'm having trouble writing anything. If I'm feeling particularly productive, I might add any quotes or particular passages I remember as well (paraphrased, of course, I don't have an eidetic memory). I've made a huge dent in my open tabs so far and I'm fairly happy with my progress in the past week. edit: I briefly saw another comment about using OneTab (sorry, I haven't had the time to read any of the other comments yet) and my current attempt is partly based on how unhappy I am with OneTab. The addon itself is brilliant, but I've realized that I'll just save all the open tabs and then ... well, that's it. They're basically bookmarks again and it's like an information blackhole for me.

It's an interesting thought experiment. Recently, I've started switching my note taking to being more aligned to the ideas in the antinet zettlekasten. (See https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/). Basically, I handwrite notes into images that I store. This basically makes it less "convenient" to search, but I've found that doesn't matter - I seem to recall things that I handwrite far, far better than anything I've ever typed. And I can make pictures. But it's still pretty nice to have it on my tablet vs a card index (though I can still transfer between the two formats pretty easily using a scanner or my phone camera). My sense isn't that there's this strict "convenience vs satisfaction" thing going on, but that there's more of a bit of a UX mismatch between how people kind of naturally interact with the physical world and the very limited interactions we currently have with the digital ecosystem. I find handwriting to be much more engaging, even on a tablet, versus typing anything. Though it still feels like we've barely scratched the surface here of what you can do with digital interaction. Maybe AI improves on this, making these more physical interactions easier for machines to understand. Like, in my note taking example, maybe my handwriting could be used as input to a recommendation system for new books. Or, instead of thinking about YouTube as a replacement for physically being on a construction site, you could have shorter, contextual videos sent to something like…

Well, the original one isn't unordered, and isn't meant fundamentally to be "searchable" (its original "implementation" being index cards). Here's my attempt at conciseness: A zettelkasten is like a bunch of files in a single folder with 1. a naming schema that kinda indicates what follows what (an ordering scheme, but persnickety and optional, see https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmann-folgezettel-truth/), and 2. links in between the files, originally just by writing the names to be manually looked for. Some people use 2 to be able to get rid of 1, as with an indication of PREVIOUS (link) and NEXT (link) The point is that you have one thing on each card / file that you might want to go back to on its own. It makes a lot of sense in academia where you want to be able to trace ideas in a referenceable way, identify your own takes on bits of other people's work, and connect different sources together when you see similarities.

I am beginning to use a zettelkasten. I think it's an excellent method for doing deep thinking, especially over a long period of time. See https://www.seanlawson.net/2018/02/use-zettelkasten-method-scientific-… and https://zoia.org/2018/11/13/zettelkasten/ for good introductions. Reading this will change your life: https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction/dp/1542866502/r… I'm committed to text-only information. No matter how many notes I'm writing, I can always use grep or write my own programs to find what I want. If you're on a Mac, The Archive is great (https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/). It's what I'm using zettelkasten.de has lots of good reading (thanks, Sascha and Christian!), but look to the other sources I've listed to get a more thorough idea of what a zettelkasten is (I call mine a thinking-box) and how to use one.

Context: https://zettelkasten.de/

Egged on by Luhmann, whom I read obsessively in my youth, I started a Luhmann-like hyper-text. Been doing it for a long time now. There are several implementations based on Luhmann's Zettelkasten, e.g. [1, 2, 3], but I've not used those myself, so can't comment on their usefulness. My own system is just HTML, grep and a few handwritten scripts. It's extremely lightweight. It's been spectacularly useful for me. In my experience such a system becomes more useful with time, and with effort put in for curating. I spend maybe 2-3 hours every day with my private 'index cards'. I guess most prolific writers in human history have been following a "write down every idea and refine it later" type system. But it must be so much easier now, with smartphones, computers, internet etc. [1] http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/ [2] http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen/ [3] http://zettelkasten.de/tools/