My Digital Zettelkasten Setup with Logseq and Syncthing
I have been quite happy with my setup, so I thought on sharing it here.
I use Logseq, which is a plaintext file, markdown-based, local-first (or local-only) outliner. It is opensource, free software and it is available for MacOS, Windows, Linux, Android (and all forks) and iOS.
- It is designed so that the native unit of information is the bullet, not the page, and so each bullet of the list can be linked.
- It also handles markdown pages / Notes as linkable elements of information, so if the bullet list doesn't bother you it is a very powerful piece of software.
- It doesn't let you create folders, but allows you to nest pages in what they call "namespaces" (which I don't use), which is pretty equivalent.
- It supports tags, and the tags are pages.
- The pages in Logseq (normal-named and tag-like) work as permanent searches on your workspace. For example, a page named #fleeting will present all the tagged bullet items as Linked References of it. Pretty handy to find tagged content and also document the meaning and context of the tag itself.
- You link by either
[[]]or#. - The pages have also aliases, so you can name your page Fleeting Notes and then put fleeting as an alias, so you can link either by
[[Fleeting Notes]]or by#fleeting. - Logseq has built-in pages: Journals, which presents an infinite timeline of notes grouped by date (each day is a markdown file);
contents.md, to create your main entrypoint; and some other pages tailored to task management. - It has built-in whiteboard which allows you to drop pages and bullets in an infinite canvas and play with relationships, built-in Excalidraw to draw in your notes, and also supports a wide range of plugins to whatever you'd like: mermaid diagrams, advanced highlighting,...
- It has all the bells and whistles otherwise: theming, favourites, export / import, basic syntax highlighting for the techy folks,...
In order to sync my ZK to my other devices I use Syncthing, which is a very powerful but quite DYI peer to peer service: you install in all your devices, share a folder, and whenever the devices are online they will sync, either through the LAN or also across the internet using cellular connectivity. The only caveat is that Syncthing is not available for iOS, so if you don't use (an) Android you may want to look for other alternatives. I used git in the past, but it's not as comfortable as it seems.
My workflow is as follows:
- I use Logseq's Journal timeline to capture fleeting notes and literature notes as nested bullets, for which I tag the top-level bullet with #fleeting and #literature. That creates two permantly-accessible dynamic hub pages which work as searches, that will always have all those notes as Linked References.
- At the end of the day or when I have marked my timeslot to process notes, I go to those searches and I process one by one deciding how I should use that note and if they should be moved to the ZK as permanent. That means creating a note, tagging it, linking to a references, and so on and so forth.
- I update my main index hub, which is in the built-in contents.md page from Logseq.
- When I need to create an output, I use a whiteboard.
If you have any questions about any of the tools above or you'd like to know more about the workflow please comment below. Also, do you folks do digital catch-ups and live demos? Do any of you have a YouTube channel? I've read some setups that would be really cool to see working.
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
Nice. It is quite a change to have the bullet and not the page/file as the primary thing. It gives possibilites, but also create complexity. But I like the idea of having your Journal automatic and separated from your ZK. The problem is always that the App creates alternative new structures like "namespaces" instead of just using standard folders.
I think that the bullets are entirely optional, in the sense that you don't have to use them: you can just link to the notes you create or the days of the journal without having to worry about the pros, cons or effects of linking to bullets. Yet, having them, is what makes it possible capture unlimited notes in a single journal day, and having them linked one by one. Thus having them is truly powerful regardless you use the link-to-bullet mechanics or not.
What I never found useful in any PKM method was the folders, and I have to say that I left Obsidian because I found myself spending a lot of time trying to adjust folders v. tags v. links to a nice balance. When I tried Logseq out of curiosity I found that I never really needed folders, thus neither I need namespaces... at least for now.
@gvisoc
I really like Logseq and have also posted about it in this forum - here is one example
Your description of Logseq is accurate and helpful for those who are not familiar with it.
My only concern with Logseq is that the developers are pursuing a different direction for improvement, namely using a conventional database approach for the files. At some point down the road, you may find that the "original" version of Logseq, which uses text-based files, is no longer supported. I hope that doesn't happen, but it could.
For full disclosure, I should mention that I have switched my ZK back to another app that I also really like called NotePlan. The post is here which also discusses some of the reasons for switching back to NotePlan.
I read about it, and it seems that the current product will be maintained. They say it wont receive new features, but it will be patched and ported to new versions of the runtimes and dependencies.
I'm quite sure that once that happens there will be some fork.
For my use, anyways, it's enough as it is today.
After Obsidian I tried Logseq too, but when I once opened a Logseq note in Obsidian, OMG what a mess. Every bullet point and every link has a unique ID, but there is no way you can figure out the original or what is linked to what.
I dropped Logseq there and then and reverted to Obsidian for 1 simple reason: Logseq's portability is awful. Yes, you can still read the text in another editor, but links, embeds, and such are untraceable therefore unusuable. Be careful!
@Ngungu, I completely agree with your assessment of Logseq, as I hinted in a short comment at the top of an August 2024 discussion. @ZettelDistraction gave us entertaining and seemingly near-real-time reporting of his horrified discovery of the nature of Logseq's Markdown in an October 2024 discussion.
I'm still actively horrified. In 2026 I wouldn't be so entertaining. I'm still using Obsidian, after switching from Zettlr. I was trying out Logseq at the time and decided against its nonstandard Markdown. I once raised an issue with Zettlr, but the maintainer dismissed it after I had already switched to Obsidian. This after-the-fact dismissal of a legitimate issue only hardened my conviction that switching from Zettlr was the correct move. In fact, the switch from Zettlr to Obsidian was done "with thy might" in the precise sense of Ecclesiastes 9:10, which I quote:
The same goes for being actively horrified by Logseq's nonstandard markdown. There's no question of maintaining any horrification whither I goest.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Now I can't get rid of my bathetic comment, which adds nothing to the discussion.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction, the forum hosts changed the editing window to 1 hour recently, but your comment is great; I love it! Thank you for responding to my ping like a summoned genie.
Times are tough. One hour is austerity discipline. The days of plenty and one-week edit windows are history. I thought I had been punished. Thank you for setting me straight.
@GeoEng51 had a daily outline routine in logseq when he was using it. Daily notes have their advantages. I have a timestamp macro that I use with weekly notes, which I tend to open first in Obsidian. logseq opens to a daily outline note by default. In my case, the weekly note is enough and starting with them is a habit. I was supposed to start the day opening Obsidian and Zotero.
Although I have a standard note template and a macro or two that I use in Obsidian, the Zettelkasten is almost an afterthought. Perhaps because I retired in February, I haven't decided on a routine. The papers and software I write all day decided without my involvement or consent that I would work on them. The Zettelkasten was supposed to provide the material for those projects. Instead, the relation between my projects and the Zettelkasten is that the projects reside in a Projects folder, which sits under the Zettelkasten folder. Perhaps the two directories will influence each other, if only by proximity.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction
I think its markdown "version" is the same as Obsidian's, but the big difference is the Outliner paradigm, which I find horrific in terms the use of bullet/block IDs which cannot be easily, if at all, traced when opening a note in another editor.
I can identify with that, because I once had a fight with him because he misunderstood me. To his credit, he did end up apologizing but it showed me his fuse is short.
Regarding Obsidian, I think both the forum and its Discord channel are pretty toxic thanks to the mods who act like demi-gods.
The closest I have is a script that lists the N most recently created cards in descending order. I don't use it much, though. I also have the ability to automatically log which card I'm working on every so often, but again I hardly ever use that ability.
So far, I've been keeping writing projects inside my ZK. Notes for it that seem like I will probably want to keep I turn into z-cards. The writing nodes themselves, and any other ephemeral note-like material are in the ZK but are not actual z-cards. I can put references to related material like a mind map of the structure of the project or of the part I'm working on. I can even put outbound links to z-cards. So I can reference anything in the ZK and look at it with virtually no friction. When the project is done, I can remove all those links and references from the parts that will be published and move the entire project out of the ZK proper.
If I had to do actual project planning with timelines, tasks, and resources to be managed I'm sure I would be thinking of using more specialized software, but for my writing projects this has worked very well.
Logseq diverges from YAML+Markdown, since it uses non-YAML properties and its Markdown interpretation is idiosyncratic. A Logseq document is syntactically a list of lists. Markdown elements such as headers have to follow the list marker
-as in- #with Markdown list indentation, as opposed to a stand-alone#,##, ...,#####at the beginning of the line.The file formats are not equivalent for a Pandoc, Zettlr, and Obsidian workflow. Obsidian stores properties as YAML front matter; my Zettel template uses root-level Markdown headings. Logseq uses
property:: valuepairs. I'll call those "Logseq properties" to emphasize the double colon, which creates a syntax error in Obsidian YAML. Logseq properties in the first block are page properties, and Logseq properties inside ordinary bullets annotate those bullets.id::is Logseq's built-in block identifier rather than Pandocid:document metadata.I find Discord distracting.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@tomp
That is close to what has happened in my case, except that projects have become central.
My effort goes into papers and software. For papers, I use VS Code with the LaTeX Workshop extension, a local MiKTeX installation, and Git for version history. The workflow is substantially better than what I had previously with WinEDT, which I still use occasionally.
I use Obsidian and Zotero for the Zettelkasten: linked notes in Obsidian, citations in Zotero. My primary project workspace is VS Code. The projects generate the notes more often than the notes generate the projects. I spend more time in VS Code than Obsidian.
Sönke Ahrens also separates permanent notes from project-related material. Likewise, I keep a Projects directory under the Zettelkasten directory.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Two fussy corrections:
In Logseq, Markdown elements such as headings have to follow the list marker
-, as in- #with Markdown list indentation, as opposed to stand-alone#,##,...,######headings at the beginning of the line. Gotta have all six hashes to be complete.A YAML parser reads
mykey:: valueas a key namedmykey:, not as the keymykeywithout the appended colon. Logseq’sproperty:: valueform is neither Obsidian nor Pandoc metadata syntax, and it isn't a YAML syntax error; it is the wrong key for the intended metadata field.GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Other than Logseq being basically abandonware from here on out and being riddled with bugs as your files grow, the strength it had and is leaving in the DB form, is that I could use org files rather than hapless markdown.
It’s a shame its a failure. I enjoyed much about it when it was actively maintained.
That nearly everyone and most applications have followed the markdown meme (with many variants, plugins, etc to overcome its clear weaknesses) is also a shame.
@svenwellz
Although I have never used Org mode, the loss is a serious regression. The official DB-version notes say that Markdown is the only supported format and Org mode files are no longer supported.
Abandonware almost right for software that will still receive security and Electron updates but no new features.
I agree about Markdown, which has many incompatible extensions to a minimal common format.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction
I also enjoyed and had high hopes for Logseq, but it seems the developers got off on the wrong track when they decided to "improve" the program by creating a database version (was there some snake oil salesman involved?). I understand the tradeoffs, but it's just turned into a gong show, as far as I can tell. We are soooo susceptible to the peculiar choices of various developers. Looking back, I can see a long list of failed products that came from either poor choices for "improvements" or letting apps languish while their competitors forged around and past them (e.g., the whole Wordperfect / Quattro Pro fiasco). Sigh...