Digital Zettelkasten Software and Tools
I recently quadrupled my creative output. Here are the tools I used »
Technology moves fast. I couldn’t get too specific about software in my book, Digital Zettelkasten, but here is a current overview of tools available for managing a digital Zettelkasten.
This is in no way an all-inclusive list. I have not spent a ton of time looking for the perfect notes app. I work with plain text and can change apps at any time – in fact I use a few different apps – so there’s little pressure for me to get it “right” from the start.
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Plain text
I’m a big advocate of plain text – written in Markdown – because it’s lightweight and data-portable. Evan Travers has a wonderful introduction to Zettelkasten in Markdown, with a table breaking down the features of various apps. Here are some of the tools I like:
- Obsidian – very customizable, lots of keyboard shortcuts. Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. iOS and Android apps in the works.
- 1 Writer – iOS app. WikiLinks support only for same directory. Good for condensing notes or reviewing highlights on the go.
- Drafts – iOS and Mac app for quick capture. You can then create Actions that send your notes to your Zettelkasten inbox.
- Ulysses – iOS and Mac app. The thing I like about Ulysses for Zettelkasten is it allows you to preview a few lines of each note. It requires hashtags to be at the end of the file, so watch out for that. A nice place to compose in Markdown and export to WordPress, Ghost.org, and Medium.
If you’d like to know a little more about how these apps apply to my workflow, read my blog post about my Zettelkasten.
Reading
- LiquidText: My PDF-reader of choice on my iPad. You can highlight and drag around elements, but I just like that you can export your highlights to plain text, to process in your Zettelkasten.
- Readwise: This syncs with many e-readers to create a database of all your highlights. It will send you a random collection via email every day. This is a great way to re-surface those highlights you might not get back to otherwise. I often copy/paste a highlight into Drafts to later convert into a note in my Zettelkasten.
- EpubPress: I don’t read many articles on the web, but when I do, this sends them to my Kindle as an epub. It’s unfortunately cumbersome to retrieve the highlights after that. I dig out from my Kindle myclippings.txt.
Hosted
I generally don’t recommend hosted notes apps that store your data in a proprietary format, or even an open format that isn’t plain text. But, Roam Research is too powerful and popular to ignore. Currently it’s only available as a web app, but it has a “cult”-like following in part because it allows dynamic linking and inclusion of every “block” of your content. It’s very complex and so is either overkill, or exactly what you need.
If you’re wondering if I recommend [insert other popular hosted non-plain-text notes app here], the answer is probably not. You do not want to get locked into a notes app and several years down the road find it has gotten so boated and slow it’s unusable.
I recently quadrupled my creative output. Here are the tools I used »
