Backlink: §2020-02-15-1247

Early in my PhD in sociology, I had heard stories about how Niklas Luhmann, the German social theorist known for his inscrutable systems theory, implemented a system to link tens of thousands of notes together. He turned his Zettelkasten into a system that, in his words, could talk back to him. (See §2020-02-07-2328 on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten.)

Some time later – I can’t remember exactly when – I came across zettelkasten.de. At the thime, Christian and Sascha were still reviewing software rather than building their own, but even then they were actively exploring the possibility of using software to implement – or rather emulate – Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system.

I didn’t play around with a zettelkasten-like sytem back then, but I was inspired by their explorations. At the time, I used a variety of ways to keep notes and thoughts in order: a paper notebook, markdown notes in Ulysses and later in Atom, some notes in DEVONthink, etc.

It was only after I fell into the Emacs rabbit hole sometime in 2017, that I started to dream about Zettelkasten-type of linking between my notes. This was no coincidence: it was precisely the openness of emacs that allowed me to experiment with some simple lines of code.

Or, even better, I could simply document my attempts at extending the deft package. I looked at some basic elisp tutorials, spent some time looking at the deft code – of which I understood only little – and, most importantly, I stumbled upon an easy way to access deft’s main functions programmatically (thanks to saf-dimitry on Github). I started playing around with emacs lisp and kept the snippets of code in a .org notebook. And all the rest is fooling around.