zk/docs/note-frontmatter.md

YAML frontmatter

Markdown being a simple format, it does not offer any way to attach additional metadata to a note. The community came up with a solution by inserting a YAML header at the top of each note to contain its metadata. This method is widely supported among Zettelkasten softwares, including zk.

---
title: Improve the structure of essays by rewriting
date: 2011-05-16 09:58:57
keywords: [writing, essay, practice]
---

zk supports the following metadata:

Key	Description
title	Title of the note – takes precedence over the first heading
date	Creation date – takes precedence over the file date
tags	List of tags attached to this note
keywords	Alias for tags
aliases	Alternative titles for this note, used by --mention

All metadata are indexed and can be printed in zk list output, using the template variable {{metadata.<key>}}, e.g. {{metadata.description}}. The keys are normalized to lower case.