pyzet

"I, of course, do not think everything by myself. It happens mainly within the Zettelkasten".

pyzet is a CLI tool targeted at note-taking and personal knowledge management loosely inspired by the Zettelkasten approach, hence the name. The whole workflow is centered around Git repos where notes are stored.

Installation

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.10+
• Git 2.25+ (but older also should be fine)

Unix and Windows are supported. You can install pyzet with pip:

pip install pyzet

Tutorial

For the quick setup for the either platform (make sure to create missing folders):

pyzet sample-config unix > ~/.config/pyzet/pyzet.yaml
pyzet sample-config windows | Set-Content ~/.config/pyzet/pyzet.yaml

Run pyzet init to create Git repo.

You can read the more detailed tutorial in docs.

Shell completion

pyzet supports tab completion. To enable it in your shell, add the following to your .bashrc, .zshrc, or equivalent shell configuration file:

eval "$(register-python-argcomplete pyzet)"

Configuration

A config file should be placed inside ~/.config/pyzet/pyzet.yaml, and looks like this:

repo: ~/zet
editor: /usr/bin/vim
editor_args: []

• repo: the location of the ZK Git repo

• editor: use it to overwrite the default editor (by default we refer to EDITOR and VISUAL env variables)

• editor_args (default: empty): optional list of CLI arguments which should be passed to the editor

Support for multiple ZK repos

You can have multiple repos, and only a single config file, because there is --repo flag that you can always set to point to a custom repo (and possibly, create an alias that includes it). If --repo flag is used, the value from YAML is ignored.

Supported editors

See docs.

Writing parsable zettels

See docs.

Development

Note

uv is required for justfile commands to work correctly.

Prerequisites:

• uv installed and on PATH
• just installed and on PATH

Installation and testing

Development dependencies are stored in requirements-dev.txt. tox is used to specify test envs and how to install dependencies.

To install package in the editable mode with dev deps:

just venv

To run pre-commit checks:

just pre-commit

To run tests against all supported Python versions:

just test

To measure code coverage:

just coverage

To run all the above tests & checks:

just all

Building and releasing

To build a new version and verify it with twine:

just build

Important

Make sure to generate an API token in PyPI.org in order to upload the new version.

To run all checks, build the package, and release it

just release

Inspiration and further reading

@rwxrob inspired me to write a stand-alone tool for note taking rather than use a ready solution. He posted a good summary in this video.

See also:

• Two essays by the creator of Zettelkasten, Niklas Luhmann
  https://luhmann.surge.sh/

• Even simpler approach to Zettelkasten
  https://gsilvapt.me/posts/poor-man-zettel/

• Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes, a great video about tools to do note-taking
  https://youtu.be/XRpHIa-2XCE