
Zettelkästen? - dredmorbius
https://clerestory.netlify.com/zk/
======
jonathanstrange
My father used to have a gigantic collection of index cards when he worked as
a professor at a high school for librarians. We're talking about 100,000 cards
or more. When he had to give a seminar session about topic X, he just selected
a bunch of cards from his well-ordered, beautiful wooden storage boxes,
fastened them with a rubber band, and took them for work. They contained
references, small summaries, newspaper articles, keywords, etc.

I tried to use the same system but never had the patience to implement it -
and the digital versus analogue divide also prevented it, because this works
best if you use only digital or only analogue. Index cards _and_ a database
don't work well together.

 _Edit: Maybe important, and I forget to mention it: All of my attempts of
replicating such a system on the computer have failed, and I have never heard
of anyone in Academia who successfully used a digital system throughout their
career. #1 Reason of failure is that the database format or program became
obsolete, #2 Database /Systems Migration problems._

~~~
MrGilbert
I think going plaintext might be the best way here.

I wonder, though... I think writing something by hand gives a different feel
for it. I don't know how to explain it. It's like your mind works better if
you write by hand.

So maybe an app, used with a stylus on a tablet or large-ish phone might be
the best combination? It should then create folders and textfiles, and just
store the text there. Which would require OCR and proofreading, of course. But
that shouldn't be an issue.

~~~
bryankam
Agreed! That's why I went for markdown in implementing it for myself.

Handwriting definitely helps, but a lot of it in this system is done during
reading (or just general life), which Ahrens calls "literature notes". Ahrens
has a theory that handwriting forces paraphrasing, which he views as important
to learning. Anyway, I handwrite all that, then there's a later stage of
integrating the relevant info into the system.

For me, searchability and accessibility, plus backup (I write a ton on paper
already and I'm a bit worried about losing notebooks) makes it worth the
digital step.

Also, I suspect from initial usage that the Zettelkasten is what Krakauer
calls a "complementary cognitive artifact":
[https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2016/09/comp...](https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2016/09/competitive-
cognitive-artifacts-and.html)

I.e., it makes you better at what you're trying to do even in the absence of
the tool. To me, the main benefit of the system is that it encourages
relational thinking.

~~~
chrisweekly
Hi @bryankam, I just realized you're the author of the linked article. Thank
you so much for writing and sharing and commenting.

Regarding handwriting, I'm of a similar mind, having evolved my own system
(hybrid of bullet journal + "slice-planner" in monthly moleskine quad-ruled
paper journals, plus .md files and evernote) which is in need of some
refinement.

------
kristiandupont
I must, as I always do, bring up my favorite editor Code Browser which works
for this to some degree: [http://tibleiz.net/code-
browser/](http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/)

I've been using it for some 15 years and I don't think I will ever leave it. I
do wish that other editors (vscode in particular) would adopt its folding
style or at least enable it. Doesn't seem promising though
([https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/17904](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/17904))

~~~
apostacy
I'd like to let people know about Sublime Zettelkasten[1], which is this
really useful module for Sublime that automates searching, linking, and lots
of other stuff. There's also a standalone version that is attempting to have
the same functionality[2].

[1]:
[https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk](https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk)
[2]:
[https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk](https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk)

~~~
captaindiego
I have some minor hacks I've made to sublimeless zk which help it play nice
with dark mode in KDE Neon (otherwise the Qt themes get overriden). They're
super messy tweaks, but if anyone is interested I'll consider cleaning up and
submitting a PR.

~~~
unqueued
Yes, please share!

I have some minor tweaks as well: [https://github.com/unqueued/sublime-
notelink](https://github.com/unqueued/sublime-notelink)

I'm making the notelink properly follow zettelkästen links, as well as some
other tweaks, so I can use my zettle file alongside my unstructured Markdown
wikis.

------
cbau
I actually was just at a small meetup for people in the SF Bay Area who are
building memex's. The Zettelkasten was a common theme in several of the
projects people were working on. Here are my notes from the event for anyone
interested:
[http://ceasarbautista.com/posts/memex_meetup_2.html](http://ceasarbautista.com/posts/memex_meetup_2.html)

There are a couple projects that came up that were loosely based on the
Zettelkasten:

\- IdeaFlow by Jacob Cole \- Roam Research by Conor White-Sullivan \- "Cards"
by Joel Solymosi

IdeaFlow and Roam are both basically WorkFlowly except that you can link
bullets together, plus additional unique features. The ability to link bullets
together basically makes it a Zettelkasten, and enables many cool features. As
Conor puts it "You shouldn’t have to know the structure of your thought as
you’re typing".

Cards was more faithful to the Zettelkasten in that the metaphor was index
cards instead of bullets. The unique thing about Joel's approach is that you
can transclude them into documents (sequences of cards), which was a feature
inspired by Project Xanadu. That enables Joel to reuse cards across many
documents, and had the benefit of letting him effectively update multiple
documents at once by editing a single card.

I've been writing an encyclopedia for the last six years. When I heard the
Zettelkasten idea it made me wish I had heard of it earlier. It seems like a
potentially better way to organize information since the links are between
paragraphs rather than pages.

~~~
emmanueloga_
Cool recap. From your article:

> Is there a general interchange format for these systems?

I don't understand why none of these people is using RDF. Seems like a perfect
technology for a memex.

~~~
cbau
I've never heard of it! I will check it out. Have you seen it used
successfully?

~~~
emmanueloga_
RDF is the technology behind schema.org, so that would be a good success
story. There are quite a bunch of companies working around RDF based
technologies, like TopQuadrant, StarDog, Ontotext, and more. But if you want
to start playing with it, I recommend you start with Jena/Fuseki [1], it is
super easy to run.

Example: say your database contains a note about "doves", and another one
about, say, "seagulls". Later, you can search for things you have written
about _birds_ , and the query would find both your notes about doves and
seagulls (something that you wouldn't be able to do with a fulltext search).
There's a whole world of things you can do with inference, so using RDF is a
no brainer when it comes to finding relationships between things. It also
makes it trivial to import knowledge annotated by other ppl.

If you are interested, here are some other resources I found useful to get
started:

* [http://www.learningsparql.com/](http://www.learningsparql.com/)

A great book about SPARQL, a query language for RDF data.

* [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596153823.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596153823.do)

"Programming the Semantic Web"

This is book is old but Chapter 2 and 3 are a good intro on "machine-readable
meaning" and Inference. The author also has another cool book on "collective
intelligence" I still haven't worked through yet :-)

* [http://www.bobdc.com/blog/reification-is-a-red-herring/](http://www.bobdc.com/blog/reification-is-a-red-herring/)

How to model "property graphs" with RDF. You'll stumble upon this question at
some point :-)

[1]: [https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/fuseki-
run.htm...](https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/fuseki-
run.html#fuseki-standalone-server)

------
mmjaa
I had the realization yesterday while waiting for a train that the Notes app
on iOS contains all the functionality I'd need in order to be able to build a
small organization/business .. as long as I standardized my form of note-
taking and rigorously applied policies on how Notes are transformed from one
Folder to the other - and on what conditions I send the Notes to others using
Airdrop.

In other words, all I really need a computer for, is formatting and forwarding
rules. ;)

Anyway it was an interesting experiment to come up with some standard Notes
that would be productive for a small office - and I realized, part way through
this hacking on the rails, thats how people used to do it: plain old ink and
paper, and a standard system for routing things around.

I started to wonder what happened? I guess HR departments got tired of having
to train workers, and came to rely on computerization as a way of 'training in
the chair' \- or, outright, replacing peoples ability to apply standard
techniques to their workday.

Even today in a computer-savvy environment, people still seem to resist the
idea of having standard ways of doing things. Everyone has this idea that they
are unique and special individuals who have more to contribute to the world
than they end up taking - but give them pen and paper and tell them thats the
only way to do things from now on, and all the hubris falls apart and the
excuses come out.

It has been true for 40 years, and I think it'll long be true for another
century at least: if you can't do it on paper first, you're not ready to
computerize the problem.

~~~
lethologica
I've thought about this as well and have tried to implement a Zettelkasten in
Apple Notes before but couldn't find an easy way to link between notes. Do you
know of a solution?

~~~
mmjaa
I don't have a solution - only convention - i.e. the users have to make the
process work.

------
ralfd
Here is a picture of German author Arno Schmidt with his "Note box":

[https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140114arnoschmidttv3-jpg/9332150/2-format43.jpg)

Btw: He is regarded as an important author who is famously not read, as his
magnus opus is even difficult to hold with a weight of 13 pounds:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seasons-biggest-novel-
has-1...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seasons-biggest-novel-
has-1-3-million-words-and-outweighs-a-bowling-ball-1474642359)

And Niklas Luhmann himself explaining his Zettelkasten (the archive with 50000
notes beside his desk):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFP5i_0ibE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFP5i_0ibE)

What he is explaining is not important, what I want to show is that it looks
like utter (creative?) chaos for someone not Niklas Luhmann.

~~~
ttepasse
Fun fact aside: Arno Schmidt's grandnephew is Dave Winer. We know Winer today
more as the chief populariser of RSS but his life's idea is more in Outlining,
organising your thoughts in nested lists and, since he's a programmer, coding
in and on outline structures.

If I remember correctly from his blog Winer and Schmidt never had much
contact, language barrier and such, so it's more of a coincidence.

------
seltzered_
A tool under development I've been recently curious about is
[https://roamresearch.com](https://roamresearch.com) which seems to be focused
less on GTD or bookwriting, but more around the aspect of knowledge capture
for intellectual work.
[https://youtu.be/L6GIW4PprQE?t=24](https://youtu.be/L6GIW4PprQE?t=24) shows a
recent state of development - mentioning zettlekasting and also Tiago Forte's
P.A.R.A.

The intriguing part of the system seems to be more in the fluid process of
hyperlinking to a topic of interest.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_Gi8EQGVQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_Gi8EQGVQ)
also shows a mind-mapping mode.

------
akavel
There's an open-source WYSIWYG Markdown editor named Zettlr, the author of
which is very fond of the Zettelkasten method and seems to provide some
features meant to help with it:

[https://www.zettlr.com/](https://www.zettlr.com/)

I don't know much about Zettelkasten, but I used this app as a Markdown editor
of choice for some time until I discovered Marktext.

~~~
_def
Wow that looks really neat! Too bad that there seems to be no Webclient,
although it seems to be a Webapp (based on Electron) ... Last weekend I hacked
a tiny WYSIWG flat-file HTML wiki for documenting a small hobby project with a
non-coder friend, but now Zettlr looks like all I ever wished for, for that
purpose. Except I would've to bug my buddy to install the Zettlr applciation
as well.

~~~
akavel
As I hinted to in the comment, if you just want a WYSIWYG Markdown editor, and
you're not particularly interested in the Zettelkasten aspect, take a look at
[https://marktext.app](https://marktext.app) too, to compare which one you
prefer. In my personal opinion, Marktext seems in particular more robust.

------
floren
I wrote a small Go program to manage a Zettelkasten-like set of notes. I use
it to keep notes for work and for personal diary-keeping.

The goal was to have the least friction possible for taking notes, figuring
that's the only way I'd actually do it. I say 'zk t' to print out the tree of
all my notes, then 'zk e 23' to edit note #23. I can set my "current" note by
running 'zk 5', then when I next run 'zk e' it'll automatically open up note
#5. There's a hierarchy, so I can make note #1 titled "work", then create
notes under that for different work topics. I can also link and unlink notes
from different points in the hierarchy, so the same note can appear in
multiple places.

The code is at [https://github.com/floren/zk](https://github.com/floren/zk) if
anyone would like to play with it. Caveat: I bashed out just enough to make it
useful, then stopped fooling with it and started working. The code has too
much manual file-bashing and struct-bashing. I've also been meaning to add the
ability to associate files with a given note (so I take notes on a paper and
attach the PDF, etc.) for at least two years but haven't done it yet.

~~~
fho
I kind of got inspired by the original article ... and your post (which was in
the top spot when I first looked at the entry). I set out to build my own
digital version of the Zettelkasten system.

But the more I think about it ... there is not a lot that there is to
implement that basic command line tools don't handle.

\---

Basically every editor (camp vim here) has support for markdown syntax
highlighting, giving you a simple way to compose notes.

Fulltext search is handled by grep (ripgrep for me), fuzzy file search (fzf)
probably comes in handy too.

If you need pretty printed notes you can use pandoc to convert multiple zettel
files into one document of basically any format.

Graphs can be created with graphviz/dot.

\---

There is little there is to improve on. From my (zettelkasten) notes:

* Something that assembles multiple notes into one temporary, editable document. Changes are commited into their respective zettel files once you close the editor.

* Some scripts that provide easy to access reports. E.g. based on recent activity, topic or based of a single zettel and it's neighbors.

\---

All of the above are more or less trivial to implement. So ... any one up to
propose something more challenging that is actually useful?

------
bracobama
I am kinda surprised no one has mentioned Tinderbox by eastgate systems! (1)

Beck Tench (2) has a brilliant youtube series (3) about how she uses tinderbox
with the zettlekasten method to create associations between various notes. She
also links these notes to her devonthink db so that when she is searching for
something there it will also pull up her relevant notes.

I myself have been using her method in writing my masters thesis and I think,
because I am a visual learner, the ability to visualise theories through a
mind-map style interface has really helped my retention and understanding of
them.

Anyway, try it out!

(1): [http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/](http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/)
(2):
[https://www.becktench.com/workflow#reading](https://www.becktench.com/workflow#reading)
(3): [https://www.becktench.com/blog/2018/11/12/using-
zettelkasten...](https://www.becktench.com/blog/2018/11/12/using-zettelkasten-
and-tinderbox-to-document-a-literature-review)

------
disqard
I have been using this system for a few months now. I keep my notes organized
as markdown files in one directory.

My experience has been positive, and my zettelkasten rewards later visits with
serendipitous connections. It's like how one often makes/discovers these
connections while conversing with a friend -- except, in this case, the
"friend" is a snapshot of your own thoughts at a different point in time.

------
dredmorbius
For those not enlightened by the German title, "Zettelkasten", or "slip-card
box", is an index-card based information capture and organisation system
created by the late Geman sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

~~~
stewbrew
He is famous for having written his books on basis of his Zettelkasten but I
doubt he invented it. It could well be he thought so himself though after
having lost/omitted the external reference on that index card of his named
Zettelkasten.

------
mooze
If you liked this idea, give TiddlyWiki
([https://tiddlywiki.com/](https://tiddlywiki.com/)) a go - it was built on
similar premises.

~~~
elasticdog
Tiddlywiki is what I use to manage my own personal Zettelkasten as well; it's
pretty well suited for the task. There's a bit of ugliness when renaming
Tiddlers, but for a lot of inter-related topics, I add an automatically-
generated list of backlinks like this:

    
    
      !!!! Backlinks
      <<list-links "[all[current]listed[]!has[draft.of]!is[system]]">>

------
richardhod
This article describes roughly how I use Evernote for about half of my notes,
and this process has made me a lot more creative and improved the quality and
coherence of my thinking.

------
car
Arno Schmidt is a somewhat obscure German author, known for the use of this
system. He wrote a book titled "Zettel's Traum".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Schmidt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Schmidt)

[https://www.zinzin.com/observations/2013/who-was-arno-
schmid...](https://www.zinzin.com/observations/2013/who-was-arno-schmidt-and-
what-is-zettels-traum-some-evidentiary-fragments/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom%27s_Dream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom%27s_Dream)

~~~
dredmorbius
Use of index cards by authors and researchers is pretty much legendary. From
some earlier research I've done:

\- Carl Linneaus, who largely invented the modern index card.
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616080137.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616080137.htm)

\- Numerous library cataloguers, including Melvil Dewey.

\- Vladimir Nabokov

\- Garrett Hardin (of "Tragedy of the Commons" fame). I've seen his personal
collection, which was extensive.

\- Herb Caen, "three dot columnist" for the San Francisco. _Chronicle_.

\- John McPhee, _The Control of Nature_ and numerous other books.
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure)

I've written previously (discussion POIC, a similar model) here:
[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a)

More on index card usage:

[https://o.ello.co/https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2...](https://o.ello.co/https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/may/09/health-
and-wellbeing)

~~~
inimino
Also Robert Pirsig, known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, whose
second book Lila is concerned extensively with an index card scheme.

~~~
bryankam
That's great to know. I loved Zen when I was younger, thanks for mentioning
Lilo.

------
mmarx
Actually, “Zettelkästen” is the plural form; the singular would be simply
“Zettelkasten.”

~~~
_Microft
German here - I misread the title as Zettelkäst _ch_ en and thought that the
word Zettelkasten was a clever way to work around the umlaut. Looks like I was
wrong ;)

A _Kästchen_ is a small _Kasten_ (box) by the way.

------
fxj
There is a famous book by Arno Schmidt, ZETTEL'S TRAUM (sic!) with only 2000
copies published because it has such a complicated layout. The gargantuan
novel was published in folio format with 1,334 pages. The story is told mostly
in three shifting columns, presenting the text in the form of notes, collages,
and typewritten pages.

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettel’s_Traum](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettel’s_Traum)

------
kiba
I have an incomplete system modeled after a few ideas of zettelkasten.

150 words per card(I wrote it out on the index card and determined its
approximate size), all organized into a single directory, with citations in
another. All have randomly generated IDs, with title as filenames. To date, I
have created about 35K words of notes across 550 cards. Only recently, did I
work on linking stuff up(using the randomly generated IDs).

I even wrote a way to display ten random cards in an electron app before
switching away to GTK and ruby(still working to get back to previous level of
functionality). I mostly used the random display of cards to re-read and
expand the cards, since I usually get more on the second read-around.

I am not quite sure how useful it is. When I was programming, I looked stuff
up in my notes and mostly added to the cards that I didn't know about
programming.

------
ashton314
As a German speaker, my biggest issue is with the first sentence: I think
Zettelkästen is a fantastic word! :)

I’m a heavy Emacs user; one of my most-used extensions is Deft [1] which was
inspired by Notational Velocity. With that I have defined some keystrokes
globally from org-mode which let me create inter-file links.

I really like this system for collecting general notes. What I think I’m
missing that this system provides is the serendipity of stumbling onto
something. I can usually jump straight to what I want. It _has_ happened on
occasion that I do run into something unexpected and welcome. I’d like to try
and find a way to make that more common.

1: [https://github.com/jrblevin/deft](https://github.com/jrblevin/deft)

~~~
efls
I'm a little late to this thread, but since you are using emacs and deft, you
might be interested in this package I created:
[https://github.com/efls/zetteldeft](https://github.com/efls/zetteldeft)

I aim to polish it a bit more before publishing it to MELPA, but you might
find it interesting already.

------
woodpanel
I had a Zettelkasten once. I (mis-?) used this system when I was preparing for
my final exams of my apprenticeship.

I had to cover a huge set of knowledge fields from which ~65% I had zero
experience with, neither theoretical nor practical.

The questions that were to be expected of course wouldn't go into too much
detail, but the variance of possible questions made it necessary to gain a
deeper understanding instead of just memorizing words (e.g. because used
vocabulary can differ/overlap from domain to domain)

I've never heard of Luhman or his system, but always thought the knowledge
contained in my Zettelkasten would make a great book and that the
Zettelkasten's modular organization would make it very easy to parse the
knowledge into whatever form you like.

------
Torwald
The Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) system is another take on this

[https://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index-
cards-p...](https://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index-cards-poic-
system/)

~~~
dredmorbius
Previously addressed ;-)

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a)

------
eitland
There is even a VS Code extension that looked promising, but I was not able to
get it to work when I tried:

\- extension:
[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nergal-p...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nergal-
perm.zettelkasten)

\- repo: [https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten-
vscode](https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten-vscode)

Also I wasn't able to find a license file when I looked now. And unlike
stackoverflow there isn't an implied license on GitHub, except to read and
fork the repo.

~~~
smnrchrds
package.json lists license as MIT.

[https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten-
vscode/blob/mast...](https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten-
vscode/blob/master/package.json)

~~~
eitland
Nice find!

Edit:

I do however suspect that this is the default when you create a new node.js
project, so it might or might not be what the author wanted..?

Anyways, often the author meant it to be open source and just forgot to add a
license. Here's one example I stumbled across where the author had just
forgotten it:
[https://github.com/louisukiri/SlackClient/pull/5](https://github.com/louisukiri/SlackClient/pull/5)

A possibly more entertaining example is the project that was on the front page
here a few days ago [0] where the author claimed that the project was Open
Source (which it was not, it was Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause, -which even
according to them Commons Clause people themselves is not Open Source[1]. This
has resultet in a rather long thread in the issue tracker[2] which is
simultaneously sad (because it is necessary but distracts from a promising
project) and entertaining (for people who can enjoy the forum equivalent of
AFV anyways).

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676)

[1]: [https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/), see FAQ,
heading "Is this “Open Source”?"

[2]:
[https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40](https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40)

~~~
Waterluvian
Isn't the package.json default license "ISC"?

~~~
zmix
Yes, it is. ISC is, for those who may not know it, an MIT license reworded, to
match international jurisdiction, which implies certain rights from the ground
up.

------
fastball
Shameless plug: I'm currently building a web app[0] that attempts to digitize
the notecard format in a way that makes note-taking easy and powerful. It's in
its infancy, but I would like to integrate better support for some
zettelkästen methodologies down the line. The "linking" in our platform isn't
quite as powerful as zettelkästen for some use-cases, but we do utilize a
"parent-child" method of organizing your notes hierarchically.

[0] [https://supernotes.app](https://supernotes.app)

~~~
Philipp0205
I get an error visiting the page :( It it only me?

~~~
fastball
Yeah, sorry about that. I am "moving fast and breaking things" at the moment
as I'm hoping to do a proper launch next week and want to make sure everything
is stress-tested and scalable before then. My fiddling with load balancers,
etc. is causing things to break periodically.

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bryankam
I wrote this article. Thanks very much for posting it here and for everyone
who read/commented/corrected me :) It's also great to hear about the other
projects in this area, so thanks again!

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drtse4
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/](https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/)

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dgb23
This way of organizing information instantly reminds me of graph databases,
and how natural it _feels_ to model and query with them.

In the back of my head I have this nagging thought that graph databases are a
strict upgrade from traditional relational (SQL) in many if not most cases.

I have nothing to back this up. It really is just a feeling. It simply feels
more fun and productive.

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ofrzeta
It's amazing that the guy is referring to Luhmann's zettelkasten and went on
to implement it and did not stumble upon an existing implementation:
[http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/](http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/)

~~~
bryankam
Thanks for mentioning this! I did have a look at that software but couldn't
get it to run on my Linux machine. To be fair, I didn't try very hard.

I also figured, since what I started was just a lightweight tree of plaintext
markdown files, that it would be easy to integrate into another comparable
system later on.

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jayalpha
Wiki in a jar
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/wikiinajar2/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/wikiinajar2/)

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chrisweekly
How did I not know about this before now? Excited to dig deeper and make time
to give it a try!

~~~
andreaste
I've been using org-mode in the Emacs editor for years. Despite my 25 years of
professional experience, I have not found anything that would be comparable to
getting involved. For me it was and is a life changer. Emacs outshines all
other editing software in the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It
is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. -
Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning of the Command Line (1998). You will See...

