In a perfect example of the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon, a month ago I had never heard of the the term Zettelkasten and now it seems to be everywhere I look. Previously, I wrote about the idea and noted that it was a perfect application for Org Mode. I’ve been experimenting with the concept a bit and using Org Mode to store and search for the data. It’s just preliminary futzing about. When I get around to using a Zettelkasten for real, I’ll probably use Jethro Kuan’s org-mode package, at least as a starting point.
In the mean time, Dan Pittman has his own Org Mode based Zettelkasten implementation. Like mine, it’s fairly elementary. He has a Bash script that captures the note title and pops him into Emacs to fill in the initial data. Like me, he uses Org agenda to search his notes by either tags or keywords. Other than the Bash script—which you could easily do without—there’s no special code: it’s just standard Org Mode. Pitmann keeps each “card” in a separate file with the the note’s date/time in the file name. That way, he can use the file name as the card ID. That’s a better strategy than what I do (using an org-id-get-create generated :ID: in a property drawer) because it’s much easier to link ideas.
I really like the Zettelkasten idea and have been collecting posts about ways to implement one. If you’d like to try it out too, Pittman’s post shows you how to get started in an easy way with a small investment in time.