What's happening in your Zettelkasten this month, September 2026?

c4lvorias

@wjenkins81 I'm glad that it benefited someone!

zettelsan

Lately, I've been spending a good amount of time tweaking my Emacs Org environment for my Zettelkasten system. A great thing about using Emacs is that it's so customizable I can turn it into anything I want (as long as my ambitions aren’t too grandiose, like controlling the weather; Emacs could probably do it, just not very well). The flip side is that I spend too much time tweaking instead of improving my notes and note-taking skills. I’m fully caught in the curse of Emacs.

Nonetheless, I’m slowly getting closer to where I want to be. My setup includes:

• Note templates (common/optional sections, metadata, etc.)
• A structure notes viewer package
• Zotero integration (ebooks, PDFs, journal papers, and other text content)
• Snipd integration (audio content, transcriptions, AI summaries, etc.)
• Citation and literature note management
• Themes (colors, font faces, etc.)

In particular, writing a tool for managing structure notes has become a bit of a hobby of mine. I find it difficult to see relevant or serendipitous relationships around a particular note without easy access to structure notes. While there are tools to generate visual graphs of nodes (notes) and edges (links), Org mode doesn't natively assign meaning to links, so those visuals aren't quite as informative.

In any case, I plan to open-source these tools, and I'll announce them once they are ready for the few people using Org mode for a Zettelkasten.