Zetteldeft

This is another entry in my series of posts on the idea of a Zettelkasten. Although I’ve mostly written about and am planning to use org-roam, that’s not the only possibility. Elias Storms built his own Zettelkasten by leveraging the Deft package and Org-mode. He built the system, which he calls Zetteldeft, for his own use but is sharing the code on GitHub.

Deft is a good starting point for a Zettelkasten because it stores each Deft note as a file in a flat hierarchy. That takes care of a lot of infrastructure for a Zettelkasten; the main thing that needs to be added is a way making and maintaining links between the notes.

Unlike org-roam, Zetteldeft does not maintain a database of backlinks. Instead, it has a function that will add a list of notes that contains a given search term. By calling this function with the ID of the current note, you can add a list of all notes that link to the current note. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to maintain this list other than deleting and rebuilding it.

Zetteldeft is written in a literate style so it’s easy to understand and hack on if you want to adopt it to your workflow. It’s a nice light-weight solution for implementing a Zettelkasten and provides an excellent starting point if you want to build your own unique implementation.

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