A simple Zettelkasten setup using Vim + FZF + Ripgrep

The zettelkasten (German: "slip box") is a knowledge management and note-taking method used in research and study.

Wikipedia

The zettelkasten method consists of taking multiple individual notes, tagging and relating them together, in order to build a private knowledge base.

I was inspired by this post, and by how the author built his own setup using Unix tools. I wanted a similar, but slightly different setup. By the way, his work is also on Github

Each zettel (probably not a real world, but I'll use that to refer to each individual note) is a markdown file, named with a timestamp and a title.

Zettels can have tags (e.g.: #programming, #quote, #really-good-advice), as well as sources (e.g.: @tim-ferriss, @mom, @myself).

They're otherwise plain markdown files, write whatever you want, in whatever format you wish. Here's a sample:

# 2020-07-17-11-30-optimization.md

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

**I opted to use markdown italic syntax for personal comments**

#quote #programming
@donald-knuth

You can then navigate your knowledge base by searching for tags, sources, or just plain full-text search.

All of this is powered by:

• Vim (Neovim works too)
• Fzf
• Ripgrep )

More tooling may be added down the line, but for now this simple setup serves me well.

1. Make sure you have the fzf, rg commands working on your shell, as well as the fzf.vim Vim plugin.

2. Clone the repo to some place:

git clone [email protected]:naps62/zk $HOME/.zk

3. Add the bin directory to your path

# add this to your .bashrc / .zshrc / .whateverrc
export PATH="$HOME/.zk/bin:$PATH"

4. Setup the needed $ZK_PATH variable, pointing to where you want your knowledge base to be:

# add this to your .bashrc / .zshrc / .whateverrc
export ZK_PATH="$HOME/zettelkasten"

5. Start using it

# create a new zettel
$ zk new "An Awesome Quote"

# search by tags
$ zk tags

# search by sources
$ zk sources

# full-text search the entire zettelkasten
$ zk search

# get help
$ zk help

Feel free to do so.

Pull requests, issues, or even a tweet is welcome.