A plain text note-taking assistant

Description

zk is a command-line tool helping you to maintain a plain text Zettelkasten or personal wiki.

Looking for a quick usage example? Let’s get started.

Or want to see it in action? Checkout Shivan’s video, Note-taking System ALL Programmers Should Consider.

Highlights

• Creating notes from templates
• Advanced search and filtering capabilities including tags, links and mentions
• Integration with your favorite editors:
  • Any LSP-compatible editor
  • zk-nvim for Neovim 0.8+
  • zk-vscode for Visual Studio Code
  • (unmaintained) zk.nvim for Neovim 0.5+ by Seth Messer
• Interactive browser, powered by fzf
• Git-style command aliases and named filters
• Made with automation in mind
• Notebook housekeeping
• Future-proof, thanks to Markdown
• Supports most Markdown syntax flavors
  • Links: regular Markdown links, [[Wikilinks]] and Neuron’s [[Folgezettel links]]#.
  • Tags: #hashtags, :colon:separated:tags:, Bear’s #multi-word tags#.
  • YAML frontmatter

See the changelog for the list of upcoming features waiting to be released.

What zk is not

• A note editor.
• A tool to serve your notes on the web – for this, you may be interested in Neuron or Gollum.

Install

Check out the latest release for pre-built binaries for macOS and Linux (zk was not tested on Windows).

Homebrew

brew install zk

Or, if you want to the latest changes:

brew install --HEAD zk

Nix

# Run zk from Nix store without installing it:
nix run nixpkgs#zk
# Or, to install it permanently:
nix-env -iA zk

Alpine Linux

zk is currently available in the testing repositories:

apk add zk

Arch Linux

You can install the zk package from the official repos.

sudo pacman -S zk

Build from scratch

Make sure you have a working Go 1.21+ installation, then clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/zk-org/zk.git
$ cd zk

On macOS / Linux

$ make
$ ./zk -h

Contributing

We warmly welcome issues, PRs and discussions.

Here you can read some useful info for contributing to zk.

Related projects

• Neuron – a great tool to publish a Zettelkasten on the web
• Emanote – an improved successor to Neuron
• sirupsen’s zk – a collection of scripts with a similar purpose
• zk-spaced – spaced repetition plugin for zk

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