zk

A plain text note-taking assistant

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

News: We Are In Maintenance Mode

Important

As of January 2nd, the original brain behind zk, Mickaël Menu, made the difficult decision to retire from zk and the suite of programs supporting it. He put out a call for maintainers, which has garnerned enough response to enable the project to continue! So zk is definitely still here for you.

During this transition phase, we are placing the project into a maintenance mode, which means we are going to address existing issues and any teething problems with transferring the code bases to the new zk-org organisation, which is where you can now find all the related projects. It also gives us new maintainers the space to get up to speed with the code base, which will help us address new issues and feature requests when they come.

So for now, feel free to lodge new issues, but please withold on feature requests until we are out of maintenance mode. This will help keep our issues boards concise and pr's easier to manage.

The call to maintainers is still open. Please comment there if you feel commited enough to come onboard! PR's, ideas, discussions and conversations are still and always will be warmly welcomed, with or without 'maintainer' status ❤️

Description

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

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 0.5+
  • 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

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 1.18+ installation, then clone the repository:

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

On macOS

$ make
$ ./zk -h

On Linux

$ make
$ ./zk -h

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