zettelcon

An external CLI tool for Zettlr note collections to automatically add backlinks to your note files. Edits files in-place, so be careful and try on a copy of your files first. Run whenever you feel like an update would be worth it.

Also check out zettelwarmer for finding new interconnections between your notes.

Assumptions

• Zettlr-standard wiki-links are used ([[...]])
• Single-line markdown syntax for headings is used (# some heading)
• Note IDs are unique, also relative to the names of the notes
• The backlink section is the last thing of a page
• Two spaces are used for list indentation

Features

• Single python file, no dependencies, under 250 sloc
• Can run multi-core for large collections
• Supports any note ID syntax without explicit regex
• Supports collections that contain more than one note ID style

$ python3 zettelcon.py --help
usage: zettelcon.py [-h] -f FOLDER [-s SUFFIX] [-c] [-n NPROCS] [-ic]

Tool to insert automatic backlinks into Zettlr note collections or other
interlinked (markdown) files.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f FOLDER, --folder FOLDER
                        Path to folder with all the zettels in it.
  -s SUFFIX, --suffix SUFFIX
                        Suffix for the files to consider. Defaults to .md
  -c, --clear-backlinks
                        Instead of generating backlinks, revert all files to a
                        no-backlinks state
  -n NPROCS, --nprocs NPROCS
                        Number of worker processes to run for file reading and
                        writing.
  -ic, --ignore-cache   Don't use zettelcon's cache, force writing to _all_
                        Zettel files (even the ones where backlinks haven't
                        changed).

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Future Work

• Only cite a few words before and after the citation
• Add horizontal break before backlinks
• Output additional info such as islands, sinks, sources, etc.
• Check out what happens if a file that links to another doesn't have a title
• Somehow reduce the number of files that are written
  • Zettlr takes quite a while to update its indices after the files get changed so it would be benefitial to reduce write operations only to files that actually get new backlinks
• Add option to clear all backlinks
• Make file writing multi core
• Add "last edited XXX" info field to markdown
• Do an analysis of computation complexity as a function of number of files (or links)
  • As expected, it's linear in the number of files
  • Doubling the cores increases performance by ~1.5x
  • Ca. 1500 notes per second dual core, 2300 n/s quad core

Discarded Ideas

• Add option to commit everything to git before updating links
  • Not needed, because you can simply define a shell function to do that

  • gen-backlinks() {
      cd $ZETTELPATH && git add -A && git commit -m "pre-zettelcon backup" ;\
      python ~/...path.../zettelcon.py -f $ZETTELPATH
    }