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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).

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
}