Zettelgarden

NOTE: This is pretty experimental and designed for me to use. Things might break and change based on my whim, so be warned

Zettelgarden is a personal knowledge management system implemented with React and Go, inspired by the idea of the zettelkasten.

Zettelgarden started out as a digital implementation of Nick Savage's personal analog (i.e. on paper) zettelkasten and as a personal learning project.

Features

• Capture Information: Zettelgarden can hold many different types of information, from long-term "Cards" (individual, atomic pieces of information), "Tasks" (short-term to-do items), and "Files" (upload your PDFs). Upload everything you have and link it together, creating a digital garden of thoughts.
• Connect Information: Effortlessly link your content together to form a network of related ideas. Zettelgarden empowers you to create a web of knowledge where concepts and tasks are interconnected, ensuring you never lose context or insight.
• Find Information: Utilize Zettelgarden's advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to efficiently locate items within your data. The app intelligently suggests links and helps you uncover meaningful connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information.

Why Zettelgarden?

Zettelgarden is an opinionated implementation of the zettelkasten technique, designed to facilitate a structured and interconnected database of information. It specializes in handling small, atomic notes that encapsulate discrete pieces of information - akin to index cards in a traditional setup. The core philosophy of Zettelgarden is that the true value emerges from linking these cards together.

There are two main benefits to keeping notes small: one, it enables you to curate information yourself. The point is not to dump articles in, but to read and write atomic thoughts that matter to the user. Then, using embeddings and retrival-augmented generation (RAG), information in Zettelgarden comes pre-chunked. This gives good results out of the box, and links you add only make it better.

Capturing Information

Zettelgarden makes it easy to capture information. Aside from the main app, there are many ways to get data in, such as:

• iOS app: share content to create tasks or cards
• Apple Watch app (coming soon)
• Browser extensions and bookmarklets (coming soon)

Architecture

• zettelkasten-front: Frontend, using React and Typescript
• go-backend: Backend, using Go with net/http
• ios-app: Experimental iOS app. It's pretty ugly, I wouldn't recommend using it yet.
• python-mail: Basic SMTP service. Written in python instead of Go because Go's SMTP services do not seem functional enough.