The main idea of Zettelkasten is the links that connect your notes. However, if you would like to organize your notes to folders, you have to set up and maintain an index Markdown file for each folder that contains all of the notes of the folder as links (wikilinks, internal md links etc.). Which means that if you move a file to an other folder, your have to remove its link from the index file of the source folder, and add a link to the index file of the target folder.
If you are struggling with the same problems (like me), ZoottelKeeper is your program. It watches your folder, catches the changes and updates your index files within every folder and subfolders automatically.
ZoottelKeeper watches the followings:
After recognizing that one of these actions happened, it creates an index file within the affected (sub)folder if it still does not exist.
Its name is going to be 000_Index_of_<folder>.md.
Then it writes the list of the files within that folder as wikistyled links.
Assume that we have a Zettelkasten folder with 2 subfolders FolderA
and FolderB
.
If I create a note called fileA.md
in FolderA
then ZoottelKeeper creates an index file within FolderA
called 000_Index_of_FolderA.md with content:
If the file is being moved from FolderA
to FolderB
, 000_Index_of_FolderB.md is going to be created in FolderB
with content
and the content the existing index file in FolderA
is going to be updated by removing the link of fileA
:
If fileA is being deleted from FolderB
then its link is going to be removed from 000_Index_of_FolderB.md
If you don't want to try it out directly on your notes, just type npm run start -- --rootFolder=./../testRootFolder
and check how it works with a test Folder.
clone or download ZottelKeeper
install Node 10.18.1
install the dependencies by running npm i
in the root folder
compile the code by npm run build
start it by npm run start -- --rootFolder=./../<relative path to your Zettelkasten folder>
(for instance, if you have a folder called Notes
and you place ZottelKeeper
as a subfolder of Notes
, and your Zettelkasten
is a subfolder in Notes as well, then your command should be npm run start -- --rootFolder=./../../ZettelKasten
)
You can stop it by npm run stop