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 }