Zettelkasten for Regular Emacs Hackers -- EmacsConf 2025 talk

ctietze

Hi everyone! Last weekend was Emacs conference and I gave a talk to inspire all the other neckbeards to set up a Zettelkasten in their beloved typing and hacking environment.

The conference page also contains instructions on how to set this up, the way I did, and the sample notes that I created for the demonstration:

https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/zettelkasten/

For reference, I hope this stays up long enough, here are the questions submitted by viewers during and after the talk. The Q&A recording, which is another hour long, is not yet online but I will post an update once the video goes live, if it goes live.

https://pad.emacsconf.org/2025-zettelkasten

Full disclosure: I am using Emacs, daily!, as my text editor of choice to write, to think, to plan, and to fiddle with text-based stuff and make things that are usually not text-based work anyway. But I do not use Emacs for my Zettelkasten. I do use it for my journal and private notes, like stuff that my child does and learned and and family matters, but everything else goes into that where I do the actual thinking and that is not in my Emacs -- because my own malleable environment of choice is to develop my own Mac application for note-taking

srijan

Thanks @ctietze . This was useful for me.

The main thing I realized I was missing was the "Correct" step. I have been feeling anxious because I cannot narrow down the "ideal" zettelkasten setup, but I realize that this is okay - it's okay to improve the process and structure as I go along.

I'm currently using denote as well - very similar to how you described it in the video - with the additional complexity of folgezettel ids.

ctietze

I think we need to do a better job at communicating that the beginning, inevitably, is tough and confusing. That's normal, and has nothing to do with e.g. any personal deficiencies.

My first 1000 notes were exciting, but I found a flow only some time after 5k. (I also believe that this is due to no material on the topic being available, which @Sascha and I developed and researched in the first place back then. So I attribute that delay to us pioneering many things and certainly hope that we can help make this easier for those who follow!)

Do something cool with the notes early on to get feedback and also stay motivated. Experiment, adapt when things feel weird, ask around, and eventually you'll find something that works for you!

jpq

Thank you for doing this. I have been using org-mode and org-roam for several years and am just now looking at more of a zettelkasten approach. I used for todos and daily notes but I eventually went back to a journal and index cards. I found that I did better with a physical note and have some scripts that use Latex to read my org files and print them out on card stock. However, I am planning on refactoring some of my older notes into a Zettelkasten framework as well as starting a fresh. Are you using denote just out of convenience or is there an advantage over using org-mode and org-roam? Also, you don't really talk about fogglezettel numbering. I think I may get to the point where I am going to want to maintain the Zettelkasten on the computer but also be able to print out and maintain a physical manifestation of it. Any thoughts?

ctietze

I can't imagine printing anything from my Zettelkasten except singular notes to share offline (e.g. in workshops) -- I would be dragged down by having a fast-moving, malleable, ever-changing system of notes and knowing that every keystroke, every fixed typo creates a separation between digital and print.

Printing, from my usage of a digital-first ZK, is reserved as a publiation step. Either publication of notes (which are ideally written like blog posts anyway) or assembled texts.