A plain text note-taking assistant

Description

zk is a command-line tool helping you to maintain a plain text Zettelkasten or personal wiki.

Looking for a quick usage example?

Or want to see it in action? Checkout Shivan's video, Note-taking System ALL Programmers Should Consider.

Highlights

• Creating notes from templates
• Advanced search and filtering capabilities including tags, links and mentions
• Integration with your favorite editors:
  • Any LSP-compatible editor
  • zk-emacs for Emacs
  • zk-nvim for Neovim 0.8+
  • zk-vscode for Visual Studio Code
• Interactive browser, powered by fzf
• Git-style command aliases and named filters
• Made with automation in mind
• Notebook housekeeping
• Future-proof, thanks to Markdown
• Supports most Markdown syntax flavors
  • Links: regular Markdown links and [[Wikilinks]].
  • Tags: #hashtags, :colon:separated:tags:, Bear's #multi-word tags#.
  • YAML frontmatter

See the changelog for the list of upcoming features waiting to be released.

What zk is not

• A note editor.
• A tool to serve your notes on the web – for this, there are some static site solutions.

Install

Check out the latest release for pre-built binaries for macOS and Linux (zk was not tested on Windows).

Homebrew

brew install zk

Or, if you want the latest state of main:

brew install --HEAD zk

Nix

zk is available in nixpkgs and has a Home Manager module.

If you want to run zk without permanently installing it:

nix run nixpkgs#zk

Or, if you want to create an ephemeral shell with zk available:

nix shell nixpkgs#zk

To permanently install zk on NixOS at the system level, include nixpkgs.zk in environment.systemPackages in your system configuration (/etc/nixos/configuration.nix by default):

environment.systemPackages = [
  # Your other packages here
  nixpkgs.zk
];

If you are using Home Manager, instead of installing for all users on the system, you can permanently install and configure zk just for your user via the Home Manager module. Add this to your Home Manager configuration:

programs.zk.enable = true;

# Modify `${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/zk/config.toml` through this attr
programs.zk.settings = {
  # Add your own configuration settings for zk here
};

Alpine Linux

zk is currently available in the testing repositories:

apk add zk

Arch Linux

You can install the zk package from the official repos.

sudo pacman -S zk

MacPorts

sudo port install zk

Build from scratch

Make sure you have a working Go 1.21+ installation, then clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/zk-org/zk.git
cd zk
make build

The latest state of main can be considered the stable pre-release state. To use the absolute latest state (bugs to be expected) and to contribute:

git checkout dev
make build

On macOS / Linux

$ make
$ ./zk -h

Contributing

We warmly welcome issues, PRs and discussions.

Be sure when contributing to branch from dev, not main.

Here you can read some useful info for contributing to zk.

Related projects

• Neuron – a great tool to publish a Zettelkasten on the web
• Emanote – an improved successor to Neuron (see Emanote configuration for zk)
• Weave – another tool to publish Zettelkasten on the web
• sirupsen's zk – a collection of scripts with a similar purpose
• zk-spaced – spaced repetition plugin for zk
• zk-graph-view - interactive graph visualization plugin for zk