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 [email protected] if you've got any great ideas!

Code

see the gist