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F Lengyel edited this page Jun 7, 2022 · 103 revisions

Software components and configuration notes

The latest version of the backward-compatible Folgezettel IDs for Zettlr is here.

There are many ways to implement a digital Zettelkasten. An inventory of the software components and configuration files I use is available at Zettelkasten software components.

Terminological troubles beset the account of note categories in the English translation of How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. This is a lightly modified copy of an article originally posted at Zettelkasten.de. The post is CC BY-SA 4.0 (I'm the author), as is this wiki.

Since From Fleeting Notes to Project Notes was published, you might find that other writers on the web will paraphrase portions of the article without attribution. Anyone writing on the web should know that anything worth appropriating without attribution probably will be. Now I take the unattributed use of several of my works around the web over the years to indicate that more of my work is worth registering with the Copyright Office.

Previously this wiki included a sample table of contents (TOC) note with 10 "top-level" categories, each of which was assigned a link within the index to a "category note." Under the link to the category note (within the TOC) were a few links to representative notes, and each of those notes linked back to the category note. The TOC and category notes were assigned special identifiers to make them easy to locate.

Within Zettlr, the notes that link to the currently viewed note are visible in the "Related files" pane. This is how category notes work within Zettlr: the notes assigned to a category (there may be more than one) are provided with a link back to the corresponding category note. By visiting a category note, the notes assigned to that category are visible in the "Related files" pane. The ten top-level categories were chosen with the expectation that they would fail sooner or later to properly classify new notes. The workflow is to find a somewhat related place within the graph of notes, add a new category-note, link this to a top-level category, and then add the new note under the new category note, and continue. The new category note can be back-linked from related notes as if it were a top-level category note and it can be linked from the TOC as another entry point into the Zettelkasten. This contributes to what Luhmann called "internal ramification."

However, after being reminded that "most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields," I decided to remove some of the documentation and to write about this subject only occasionally. Potential exposure to the charge of not "having a serious context of use" is to be avoided. The deleted and cut pages are now Pythagorean secrets.