Backlink: §2020-05-13-1815 Customizing Zetteldeft

In principle, Zetteldeft works from any mode.

To make it work nicely with a Markdown of Zettelkasten, there are a few things you can do.

First, make sure deft-extensions is set correctly. If md is the first element on the list, new notes will be Markdown notes. Zetteldeft uses Deft to create new notes, so using zetteldeft-new-file should now create Markdown files.

(setq deft-extensions '("md" "org" "txt"))

In such Zettelkasten links are often wrapped in square brackets. This can be easily achieved by setting the zetteldeft-link-indicator and zetteldeft-link-suffix.

(setq zetteldeft-link-indicator "[[")
(setq zetteldeft-link-suffix "]]")

To make sure that your Markdown notes start with correct title syntax, customize the zetteldeft-title-prefix.

(setq zetteldeft-title-prefix "# ")

To highlight links you need to set up font-lock keywords for markdown-mode.

(font-lock-add-keywords 'markdown-mode
   `((,zetteldeft-id-regex
      . font-lock-warning-face)))

Alternatively, if you want to highlight the brackets as well, you need to escape them like so:

(font-lock-add-keywords 'markdown-mode
   `((,(concat "\\[\\["
               zetteldeft-id-regex
               "\\]\\]")
      . font-lock-warning-face)))