ZK-Notes

A Zettelkasten-style personal knowledge management app for Windows.

Features

• Fast note capture — Ctrl+Shift+N popup for instant note creation
• Markdown editor with live HTML preview (WebView2)
• [[wiki-links]] and inline #hashtags parsed automatically
• Full-text search powered by SQLite FTS5
• Tag-based filtering across all notes
• Interactive graph — force-directed visualization of note relationships (zoom, pan, click)
• Weekly review — surfaces notes not reviewed in the past 7 days
• Local-first — notes stored as .md files with YAML frontmatter; no cloud required

Tech Stack

• .NET 9 / WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)
• CommunityToolkit.Mvvm (MVVM source generators)
• Markdig (Markdown parsing)
• YamlDotNet (frontmatter serialization)
• Microsoft.Data.Sqlite (FTS5 search index)
• Microsoft.Web.WebView2 (Markdown preview)

Build & Run

dotnet restore
dotnet build
dotnet run --project src/ZKNotes

Requires .NET 9 SDK and WebView2 Runtime (included in Windows 11 / Edge).

Testing

# Run all tests
dotnet test

# Run with detailed output
dotnet test --verbosity normal

The test suite includes 59 tests covering:

• Link parsing ([[wiki-links]])
• Tag extraction (#hashtags)
• Note storage and persistence
• YAML frontmatter serialization

See tests/ZKNotes.Tests/README.md for details.

Project Structure

src/ZKNotes/
  Models/        — Note, NoteMetadata, AppConfig
  ViewModels/    — MainViewModel, NoteEditorViewModel, SearchViewModel, GraphViewModel, ReviewViewModel
  Views/         — XAML views + code-behind
  Services/      — StorageService (file I/O), SearchService (SQLite FTS5)
  Helpers/       — LinkParser, TagParser, MarkdownHelper
  Converters/    — WPF value converters

Notes are stored as Markdown files in Documents/ZKNotes/ with YAML frontmatter containing metadata (ID, title, tags, links, timestamps).