zettel-mode [name subject to change]

An opinionated Emacs mode for Zettelkasten-style note-taking. Heavily inspired by org-roam, striving to be simpler, less dependent on the external state (like the auxiliary database of org-roam) and local only to the affected files (i.e. no global minor modes).

ASSUMPTIONS

Traditionally uses Deft as its "entry point" and was initially developed under an assumption the Deft files reside in ~/.deft/. It should work with any deft-directory but you'll need to customize auto-mode-alist accordingly. Using subdirectories isn't supported.

It's possible to have secondary Zettelkastens outside of ~/.deft/, or ignore Deft whatsoever by handling auto-mode-alist manually, for example:

;;; Any .org file inside a zettel/ or zettels/ directory.
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("/zettels?/[^/]+\\.org\\'" . zettel-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("/home/USER/my-zettelkasten/[^/]+\\.org\\'" . zettel-mode))

To prevent zettel-mode from associating with the Deft files, eval (setq zettel-mode-no-deft t) before loading zettel-mode.

FEATURES

• Quick new note creation: select some text and press C-c C-l.
• A sidebar with lists of references to and from the current file.
• A fully optional reference and backreference cache (rebuilt with make(1)).

For the settings see the provided Customize menus.

SCRIPTS

In the scripts/ directory reside some helper scripts for common maintenance tasks for the notes. In general they work but they probably don't handle all the corner cases (like filenames with special characters). Each script has a brief description included as a comment.

FAQ

Q: Why it's not on MELPA?

A: I don't want to hoard such a generic name as zettel-mode and for now I don't have a better name for it either.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2020 Wojciech Siewierski

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.