⚠️ Mac app (available soon)

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Bear notes Hugo theme

Online Zettelkasten/Digital garden Hugo theme.

Sites using zettels

• https://dilrong.com
• https://digitalgarden.guidopercu.dev/
• https://notas.cristian.lat

💻 Installing & running

On your config.toml, set the theme as follows: theme = "github.com/crisrojas/zettels", alternative you could just git clone this repo inside the "themes" folder or submodule it with git submodule.

git submodule add https://github.com/crisrojas/zettels.git themes/zettels

From bear, export your notes as markdown into the content folder. You'll also need to put there an _index.md file. This will be the webiste entry point.

To make things easier you could use one of this tools:

• Bear Markdown Export
• Bhugo (Be aware that native Hugo tags aren't supported yet)
• Bear markdown images fixer script (please, make a backup before running the script)

Run with hugo server --disableFastRender , this will avoid a weird bug that I've not tracked yet (content being rendered multiple times)

⚙️ Config file

This is the config.toml I'm using for publishing my notes.

I'll add more details about usage in the future. For now you can copy-paste and replace the variables to fit your needs.

languageCode = "es-ES"
title = "Notas"
uglyURLS =  true

relativeURLs = true

publishDir = "public"
pygmentsUseClasses = true

assetDir = "themes/zettels/assets"

DefaultContentLanguage = "es"

theme = "zettels"

[outputs]
  home = ["HTML", "JSON"]

[params]
    theme = "duotone-light" 
    bear = true
    favicon = "favicon.ico"
    author = "Cristian Rojas"

# Enable tags.
[taxonomies]
    tag = "tags"


# Allows rendering the html inside markdown
[markup.goldmark.renderer]
unsafe= true

ℹ bear = true uses filename as a title on the frontend instead the title yaml property.

🎨 Themes

On your config file, pass the chosen theme as a parameter:

[params]
  theme = "duotone-light" 

You can chose between duotone-light and red-graphite.

More Bear themes will be added in the future.

🌎 Language

On your config file, pass the chosen language as a parameter:

DefaultContentLanguage = "es"

Languages available: Spanish ("es"), English ("en"), French ("fr")

🔗 Linking notes

Linking is done through double-brackets syntax.

Ex.: [[wikilink]], where "wikilink" is the filename of the note to be linked.

I'll maybe add a feature to allow choosing linking from note's title instead of filename.

<!-- Input -->
[[biology]]
<!-- Regex looks for markdown file... -->
biology.md
<!-- Output html -->
<a href="biology.html">biology</a>

Spaces in wikilinks are supported: [[spaced link]] outputs <a href="spaced-link.html">spaced link</a>

🔙 Backlinks

Backlinks are supported. Example → here

Nested tags

Nested tags inside note content are rendered. Expect some errors on tricky cases.

UI/UX

If you're thinking this obviously looks a little too much like Bear, you're right.

This is not coincidental. The reasons are basically:

• I ❤️ 🐻
• I've tried before to implement a good navigational UI for an online zettelkasten. I failed.
• Bear interface has been already polished from trial and error. No need to reinvent the wheel.
• I wanted a tool to publish my Bear notes and also wanted to "feel at home" when navigating.
• Not having to worry about design decisions boosts dev speed.

Shortcuts

To open index/search hit:

• Ctr + K
•  Cmd + K

🚧 toDo

• Adding more themes
• Allow custom CSS?
• Escape wikilinks inside inline code blocks
• Correct tag regex for special cases and add unit tests for both, wiki-regex and tag-regex.
• Create quickstart repo and add Netlify deploy button.
• 🇪🇸 → 🇬🇧: Change "privado" tag finder to "private-note"
• Integrate an image zoom library?
• Side menu: toDos, private notes, tag list, etc...
• Thumbnails on search component (from now we're loading the first image of each note from the very beginning without any kind of optimization)
• Lazy load those thumbnails
• Add support for Hugo tags (yaml)
• Add [[links to/headings]] support. See this hugo thread for an idea of the regex implementation
• Add Zettels to the Hugo theme repository
• Integrate slideout js

Done

• Allow choosing themes from config file
• Bear highlight regex: ==highlighted== && ::highlighted::
• Code blocks
• find a way to localize theme strings.
• 🐻 Bear alike search sidebar
• Polar Markup support? (Nope → It will be deprecated)

Maybe one day/ Nice to have

• Theme selector from the frontend
• Dark theme detector from OS settings?
• Obsidian alike nodes graph
• Bear alike nested tag list
• Port frontend to a more SPA alike tech
• SSG from Bear SQLite database (wip?)