pyzet

"I, of course, do not think everything by myself. It happens mainly within the Zettelkasten".

pyzet is a CLI tool targeted at note-taking and personal knowledge management loosely inspired by the Zettelkasten approach, hence the name. The whole workflow is centered around Git repos where notes are stored.

Installation

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.10+
• Git 2.25+ (but older also should be fine)

Unix and Windows are supported. You can install pyzet with pip:

pip install pyzet

Tutorial

For the quick setup for the either platform (make sure to create missing folders):

pyzet sample-config unix > ~/.config/pyzet/pyzet.yaml
pyzet sample-config windows | Set-Content ~/.config/pyzet/pyzet.yaml

Run pyzet init to create Git repo.

You can read the more detailed tutorial in docs.

Configuration

A config file should be placed inside ~/.config/pyzet/pyzet.yaml, and looks like this:

repo: ~/zet
editor: /usr/bin/vim
editor_args: []

• repo: the location of the ZK Git repo

• editor: use it to overwrite the default editor (by default we refer to EDITOR and VISUAL env variables)

• editor_args (default: empty): optional list of CLI arguments which should be passed to the editor

Support for multiple ZK repos

You can have multiple repos, and only a single config file, because there is --repo flag that you can always set to point to a custom repo (and possibly, create an alias that includes it). If --repo flag is used, the value from YAML is ignored.

Supported editors

See docs.

Writing parsable zettels

See docs.

Development installation

Development dependencies are stored in requirements-dev.txt. To install the package in editable mode with the dev dependencies run the following after cloning the repo:

pip install -e .
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

For running tests more easily, you might also want to install tox:

pip install tox

Then you can easily run:

tox -e coverage    # pytest with test coverage
tox -e pre-commit  # run pre-commit checks on all files

Building

tox                  # runs all tox envs making sure tests pass
pyproject-build      # builds both the wheel and source dist
twine check dist/*   # checks if the build isn't completely broken
twine upload dist/*  # asks for username and password

Make sure to generate an API token in PyPI.org in order to upload the new version.

Inspiration and further reading

@rwxrob inspired me to write a stand-alone tool for note taking rather than use a ready solution. He posted a good summary in this video.

See also:

• Two essays by the creator of Zettelkasten, Niklas Luhmann
  https://luhmann.surge.sh/

• Even simpler approach to Zettelkasten
  https://gsilvapt.me/posts/poor-man-zettel/

• Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes, a great video about tools to do note-taking
  https://youtu.be/XRpHIa-2XCE