Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method • Zettelkasten Method
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/17
Every now and then you bump into an interesting post on a workflow you already have but did not know the name for.
This time it is [Wayback/Archive] Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method which has this nice definition:
A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.
I thought a bit about it and it feels quite a bit like this blog: the ~5k draft posts at the time of writing are similar to a Zettelkasten: short notes with title and links either internally or externally.
These drafts are private, but the actual blog posts are either public (already published: some 8k at the time of writing) or queued for publication (some 2 years at the time of writing).
The reason for using WordPress as knowledge base is that when I started this blog a long time ago it was the best mature blogging platform. By now it means that there is already a truckload of linked information in it and I’m quite familiar to the editor (especially the keyboard bindings), so switching is hard.
If I would start now, I would likely use a lightweight markup language (like Markdown or reStructuredText), git for version control and branching, and a light-weight publishing platform like GitLab Pages or GitHub Pages.
More on that below under “Obsidian”
Learning by fiddling with low-tech
The cool thing about going low-tech is that it becomes way more light weight enabling a much broader and simple set of tools like for instance shown in these videos (full view below the signature):
- [Wayback/Archive] Zettelkasten using vim, tmux and fzf (2021) – YouTube.
- [Wayback/Archive] Zettelkasten Workflow (WIP) (zsh scripts plus description to make the workflow easier)
- [Wayback/Archive] junegunn/fzf: A command-line fuzzy finder
- [Wayback/Archive] Simplified Zettelkasten / note taking from the command line #Shorts – YouTube
An example repository [Wayback/Archive] bbelderbos/bobcodesit: Coding tips (mainly Python) I share on social media.
It has an index of all articles so far at [Wayback/Archive] bobcodesit/index.md at main · bbelderbos/bobcodesit.
Another benefit about observing how someone else implements Zettelkasten is that you can learn a lot about tooling and technology. So I learned about these:
- [Wayback/Archive] Carbon | Create and share beautiful images of your source code (which when publishing the image as a Tweet will fill the alt-text with the code: how cool is that!)
- It is open source at [Wayback/Archive] carbon-app/carbon: Create and share beautiful images of your source code
which mentions you can also publish a gist usingcarbon.now.sh/<gist_id_goes_here>).
- It is open source at [Wayback/Archive] carbon-app/carbon: Create and share beautiful images of your source code
- [Wayback/Archive] PyBites-Open-Source/pybites-carbon
- [Wayback/Archive] How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers: Ahrens, Sönke: 0781349138219: Amazon.com: Books
Via:
- [Wayback/Archive] Bob Belderbos on Twitter: “@willjsteele Funny you mentioned, I am just setting up a separate “Zettelkasten” for my notes. I described my method so far here (I will port it as blog post as well): …”
- [Wayback/Archive] Bob Belderbos on LinkedIn: #productivity #tips #developer (I was quite amazed this would archive at all, as usually LinkedIn hates being archived as they want to keep people in their own ecosystem)
- [Wayback/Archive] Bob Belderbos on Twitter: “@willjsteele I started a separate one for code tips :)
github.com/bbelderbos/bobcodesitThanks for asking and thanks @jpluimers for asking for the code the other day :)” - [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “@bbelderbos @willjsteele I’m going to put that in a future blog post. Basically my
wiert.meblog is one huge Zettelkasten: some 8k posts published, 5k drafts (usually just quick notes, some a lot longer) and 650 posts in the publishing queue.” / Twitter
- [Wayback/Archive] Bob Belderbos on Twitter: “Here is how you can run a function every 5 minutes in #Python (Standard Library vs PyPI package):”
- [Wayback/Archive] Bob Belderbos on Twitter: “@jpluimers @learn_byexample @HBeckPDX @AltTxtReminder @carbon_app That part I have down even with CLI and all: … Just the ALT part I will have to do manually, but at that point I already have the code on my clipboard (how Pybites Carbon works) so not a big deal.”
- [Wayback/Archive] Bob Belderbos on Twitter: “In case you wonder about my code images: 1. I use:
carbon.now.sh2. via CLI:github.com/PyBites-Open-Source/pybites-carbon3. with shell alias:function carb { (carbon -c -b \#A0D6B4 -w bw -d dest_dir) }(-c= from clipboard,-b= custom color,-w= style image control buttons)”
- [Wayback/Archive] Bob Belderbos on Twitter: “In case you wonder about my code images: 1. I use:
Obsidian
A more visual interface to low-tech Markdown files organised in a folder is [Wayback/Archive] Obsidian (@obsdmd) who make [Wayback/Archive] Obsidian
Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
…
available for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux (AppImage), Linux (Snap), and Linux (Flatpak).
It is free for personal use and offers paid plans for syncing and publishing (although personally I’d use git and GitLab Pages or GitHub Pages for that, see above) as per their [Wayback/Archive] Pricing – Obsidian.
The cool thing is that based on low-tech, they can generate high-tech knowledge graphs which brings them towards a mind map. Most mind mapping tools however use high-tech, especially when storing their underlying knowledge data.
Though mostly closed source, Obsidian uses github for tracking, documentation, API, examples and more, see their repositories at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub: Obsidian.md.
I got there via [Wayback/Archive] Egor Kovetskiy on Twitter: “I’ve recently re-discovered a note-taking method called Zettelkasten. I’ve spent about ten hours re-writing the third part of my notes into the new system. The system will allow me to browse through the collection of my ideas and independent but interconnected thoughts.” (which I saved in [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @reconquestio on Thread Reader App):
He referred to another great example on using Zettelkasten by [Wayback/Archive] Nikita (@nikitavoloboev). Their current knowledgebase repository is at [Wayback/Archive] nikitavoloboev/knowledge: Everything I know which is rendered at [Wayback/Archive] My Knowledge Wiki | Everything I know.
Important starting points for learning are their pages on:
- [Wayback/Archive] My workflow in writing and maintaining this wiki | Everything I know (it contains a lot of references to tooling and other Zettelkasten knowledge bases)
- [Wayback/Archive] Docusaurus | Everything I know
- [Wayback/Archive] Develop. Preview. Ship. For the best frontend teams – Vercel
Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance.Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.
They also have a free plan, see [Wayback/Archive] Pricing – Vercel
- Extensive comments to [Wayback/Archive] What {note taking|team wiki|personal wiki|external brain} tool do you use? | Lobsters
- [Wayback/Archive] Search wiki v1 – YouTube using [Wayback/Archive] Alfred – Productivity App for macOS
Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac.
[Wayback/Archive] nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind: Alfred workflow to search through my notes and bookmarks
--jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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