Kate(-based editor + Markman + Baloo) as a Zettelkasten hyperlinked note taking

Brainstorm
, ,
1

I recently found out about Zettelkasten and its digital implementations in e.g. Zettlr, Joplin and Obsidian.MD.

What I really like about this approach is how easy it is to just jot something down, tag, and later find and connect with other notes in order to start building a personal knowledge base (and documents).

What I dislike is that I would need to rely on another text editor (usually Electron-based too!) and that the files would be re-indexed again, while I already have a great text editor and index at hand.

So far I installed and enabled Marksman in Kate’s LSP and that already does a lot in this direction (use version 2023-07, as that fixes a bug that Kate encounters). But having a full-text search through the whole project (or even the whole disk!) at hand would be really useful for starters.

Most of the building blocks are already available in KDE in order to replicate the same functionality:

  • indexing of files – Baloo
  • powerful multi-file/project text editor – Kate
  • easy “WikiLinks”-style internal linking between files and in-document anchors – Marksman (Markdown LSP)
  • tagging – Baloo(?), also via Marksman – probably best if the in-file plaintext #tags get automatically assigned also file-based metadata tags viewable in

What seems to be missing from KDE’s building blocks is a graph view component (and perhaps Zotero integration) – then we’d have pretty much everything. It would just need to works more nicely together either within Kate or a separate note-taking app that integrates Kate as the text editor (and Marksman as LSP).

1 Like
2

Perhaps this would make sense even as an added feature to GhostWriter

3

Hello,
Features resulting from using LSP and Marksman could be fantastic.
Can you share more details about that? Could we see your 'LSP setting.json file?

Thank a lot.

4

All I did was install Marksman and put this into ~/.config/kate/lspclient/settings.json:

{
    "servers": {
        "markdown":
        {
            "command": ["marksman", "server"],
            "rootIndicatorFileNames": [".git", ".marksman.toml"],
            "url": "https://github.com/artempyanykh/marksman",
            "highlightingModeRegex": "^Markdown$"
        }
    }
}
5

I will try with that!
Thank a lot!

1 Like
6

Are you saying you are able to use a link from one markdown file to open the linked markdown file in Kate?

I am able to open full links in a browser by Ctrl+Clicking the link in a file in Kate (after turning on the Open Link plugin). But it doesn’t seem to allow me to link two markdown files?

7

Yes, with Marksmith using WikiLinks – e.g. [[README]] would:

  • provide a preview on mouse-oveer
  • on Ctrl+click open README.markdown in a new tab.
  • provide auto-complete (with preview) when typing WikiLinks