Home

Overview

ZettelGeist is a plaintext note-taking system, inspired by the ZettelKasten Method.

How to Get Started Now

First-time visitors should read our statement on Note Format and instructions for installation.

Proceed from there to the User's Guide.

Related Work and Inspiration

The project founders have both been interested in taking notes long before discovering ZettelKasten and have experimented with various systems. We really like the thought process behind ZettelKasten, however, and think it is ahead of its time by being less is more in its focus. Although ZettelGeist is a powerful system, we consider it to be an incarnation of a ZettelKaasten system, and there are many potential valid implementations thereof.

YAML and/or Markdown

As its name suggests, ZettelGeist implements the spirit of ZettelKasten; the key feature of our approach is to work from plaintext files. We are inspired by pandoc and Jekyll, systems that employ Markdown and YAML to create elegant and intricately structured documents. We are starting even more simply by using YAML alone, without Markdown, but have since reintroduced Markdown (optionally) for those who find YAML too limited.

Most visitors to this site will know that YAML is a computer-readable data format designed to be maximally legible to humans (compared to other approaches, e.g. JSON, which has more rigid syntax requirements not ideal for note-taking). These features make YAML (+Markdown)a perfect format for basic notetaking.

In ZettelGeist, YAML plays a central role for organizing the metadata of a Zettel, while users can include Markdown by writing YAML frontmatter at the beginning and including Markdown as the rest of the document. The use of Markdown, however, is completely optional. This approach follows many of the variants of Markdown, including Pandoc markdown, but our use of front-matter is specifically in support of notetaking as opposed to producing output documents. Of course, we are writing actual books with this, so we will be including recipes to explain how to produce round-trip editable documents from your zetteln.

How to use ZettelGeist

Technically, you can start using our tools without using our tools. After all, it's plaintext, so you can start writing and incorporating elements of ZettelGeist and install the tools once you need to perform queries and various transformations on your notes (zetteln):

• Follow the traditional and ever-valid methods of scholarly note-taking: write research note-cards with a title, some keywords, a quotation (with optional comment or summary), and bibliographical citation (such as the book or article title and page number).

• Store your research notes safely and sustainably. You can keep your notes anywhere, but we strongly recommend using GitHub. This allows you to do version control (as if your notes were source code) and work on collaborative writing projects as well.

• Retrieve and browse notes on a particular topic.

• Pull and organize notes to be used in writing a scholarly book or article.

These best practices for these research activities were developed and refined long before the advent of personal computers. ZettelGeist merges the traditional techniques into the computer world.

ZettelGeist is the missing link between applications for managing bibliography (Zotero is our favorite) and plain-text workflows for scholarly writing.

New to the world of plaintext writing? Start with our GDocs Tutorial.