What?

Windsurf helped me whip up a neovim plugin for my daily notes workflows. It has a few features that make my note taking workflow day-to-day a tiny bit more fluid

Context #

I learned about the concept of a zettlekasten recently and it really spoke to me. I’ve sought for YEARS to have a nice note-taking workflow, where I never think about where to put something, it’s searchable, portable to some degree, and customizable… I’ve used OneNote and its derivatives, different self-hosted container based note taking apps, raw markdown files scattered on my file system, etc… I think I’ve finally landed on a solution which is basically this blog + some tooling to achieve the things I want…

• markata is the build system, it’s what lets me keep all my notes in markdown files, and build them into a cohesive searchable experience on the web
• neovim is my primary note taking environment - using tools like marksman I get the ability to “jump” to wiki-linked posts and grep content easily for searching
• copier is used for generating note templates - whether it’s a til, blog post, or starting my daily note page - copier makes it quick to stub out the file in the right place with the right tags and frontmatter for markata

Usage #

I’ll explain the daily notes workflow here, the code is below…

There’s basically just a couple things I wanted smoothed out in my note-taking as I am getting started here…

1. I need an immediate way to get to my daily notes page… I have started keeping a new note for each day and it’s a chore to copy paste the old note, update the date, delete content, etc… instead check_and_open_daily_note checks the directory I keep my daily notes in pages/daily in my blog repo, checks the date for a note for today and either creates it from the copier template or opened it as my current buffer

I could maybe improve this by making it global so that no matter what directory I’m in I could open the daily note with a keymap or lua function call instead of swapping tmux sessions and then opening the file

2. I need a way to link to yesterday’s notes so it’s easy to “go to definition” on the wiki link which opens the file…
3. I wanted to track page linking… this is something core for me as I am building out my personal knowledge base, but I have key areas in my life where I want to see graphical links, or at least make it easy to trace thoughts I’ve had like clicking through wikipedia, so the find_backlinks function brings up a menu of all the pages that link to the one I’m in

I’m sure I’ll add more functions as time goes on - it’d be ncie to open certain slash pages like Now with a keymap… drop me a note at nic@pype.dev if you’ve got any great ideas!

Code #

see the gist