Christian Tietze gave a very nice talk at the EmacsConf 2025 about Zettelkastens and their implementation in Emacs. The first part of his talk is about Zettelkastens and why you should be using one. He also discusses what type of information to put in an entry and the purpose of forward and backward links.
The second part of the talk discusses how Tietze uses Protesilaos Stavrou’s Denote package to implement his own Zettelkasten and give a demonstration of it in action. There are, of course, some dedicated Zettlelkasten packages like org-roam and org-node but Denote seems like a more flexible solution although it may lack some of the features of org-roam and its brethren.
My main complaint about the video is that it moves too quickly and is hard to follow in places. That’s especially true of the demonstration. On the other hand, Tietze probably had at least a soft time restraint for his talk and had a lot to cover.
Before the talk, Tietze published a post that outlined what his talk was about at a philosophical level and has a link to the conference page for his talk that contains an transcript of the talk and some of the material he shows in the talk. It’s worthwhile taking a look at this resource before watching the video to help you follow along.
The talk is 23 minutes, 18 seconds long so plan accordingly.