nik

General Information

nik is a simplistic, versatile implementation of the Zettelkasten note-taking method roughly based on the original Zettelkasten introduced by German sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann. It is based on plain-text markup files and intends to not get into your way whenever possible. Think of it more like a useful companion that helps you to browse, navigate and visualize your text-based Zettelkasten.

Features

• Plain-text markup files (Markdown, Org-mode, AsciiDoc)
• HTML based web view of your Zettelkasten (using static site generator)
• LaTeX support for web view (using MathJax)
• GraphML export of your Zettelkasten

Installation

You can install nik from The Python Package Index (PyPI). To do this, run the following command:

• pip install nik

Usage (CLI)

Initialize a directory as your Zettelkasten with nik init <PATH>. Following on you can either provide the path to the Zettelkasten directly (-d option) or use the environment variable ZETTELKASTEN_PATH to point to your Zettelkasten. To show some basic information about your Zettelkasten run nik status. You can always run nik --help to ask for help.

Usage (Python)

Did you know that nik is both a command-line tool and a Python library? This is how it works:

from nik import Zettelkasten

path = '~/Zettelkasten'
z = Zettelkasten(path)

# Let's perform a rescan of the Zettelkasten directory
z.scan()

# Print all files in the index
print(z.index.files)

Development

• Create and activate virtual environment: e.g. mkvirtualenv -p /usr/bin/python nik
• Install: pip install -e .
• Run: python -m nik