Introducing tzk (TiddlyZettelKasten edition)

, ,
#1

Following up from the thread this spring about A Tour Through My Zettelkasten, in which a bunch of people were interested in getting a copy of my Zettelkasten that they could start their own notes from, I’ve now released a somewhat more formal edition of my Zettelkasten called tzk. You can find it here.

It comes with a CLI written in Python that can be used to quickly spin up a wiki and commit changes to a managed Git repository, as well as build derivative wikis, which can be used for things like creating public editions.

This is still something of an alpha version; it doesn’t use a plugin so it won’t be practical to update to a newer version, it’s still almost completely focused on the features I need, and there are doubtless a bunch of bugs and glitches. I can’t promise support for it. That said, I would still be happy to hear feedback, and I hope it’s useful to someone.

I also put out a walkthrough video, which is somewhat long and not particularly well-organized. This is my attempt at a compromise between getting too far ahead of the current state of the software with perfect documentation and having too little documentation to make it usable:

6 Likes
[tw5] Re: A tour through my Zettelkasten
TZK: One of the Best Zettelkasten Editions of TiddlyWiki
Introducing a Global Variable for Author/Reader Mode
Who is using Tidgraph and are there (better) alternatives?
Making editions easier
Problem add Context menu to Soren Bjornstad's tzk
#2

Wonderful!
A real polished note taking edition!

I am going to do more experiments and I will let you know if there is any comment!

Cheers

#3

I realize I never put an enthusiastic comment here. Instead, I tweeted about it tonight as I was exploring tzk.

@sobjornstad this is really great, and thank you for making it available and documenting it so well!

It’s fascinating to see someones opinionated take on a toolchain of note taking, and think through how my own opinions differ. And then of course how I might extend or modify what’s there.

1 Like
#4

Hi @sobjornstad , thank you for releasing tzk!

It looks like the latest update was 7th October 2021. Is the copy of tzk at My TiddlyZettelKasten — Say something clever about it here still being updated?

Also, have you considered spinning off the Reference Explorer into its own plugin for easy installation onto other TW that don’t follow the zettlekasten format?

#5

Yep, I’m still planning to update it – haven’t needed to make a lot of substantial changes to the wiki since then.

I’m not sure how useful the Reference Explorer would be as a plugin as-is – it relies on a particular set of type tags, and if you don’t use exactly those tags you have to go edit the tiddlers manually to get the ones you want, at which point you’re ending up with pretty much your own version and having them available as a plugin didn’t help much.

It’s really just a group of self-contained tiddlers in $:/sib/refexplorer, so you can just export those, copy them into another wiki, and edit them as needed if that’s what you want.

Also, if someone else is interested in doing the work to rewrite it so the tags it uses are more easily configurable and publish it as a plugin, I’d be totally cool with that!

1 Like
#6

Nice work @sobjornstad I have not gone through the whole video yet but your introduction is a great example of leading people into the use of tiddlywiki both through your video and supportive content.

  • I hope soon we may build some generic resources that people can reference but you are setting a great example.