I've tried to keep a Zettleksaten several times now with no real luck. My most recent try was using TiddlyWiki, with each Tiddler being an entry, usually containing a single piece of information. Perhaps it's the way TiddlyWiki is laid out, but I didn't particularly find the filing system to be of any real benefit to me. After my 30 day experiment I had nearly 1,000 Tiddlers and the majority were interlinked. When I would click through the hyperlinks I wouldn't necessarily have any particular 'a-ha' moments that these articles on Zettlekastens typically try to convince you will happen when you use this filing system.
Perhaps I went about it all wrong, but I loved the theory but didn't find the particular application useful. I also found absolutely no examples of a real life Zettelkasten online anywhere. None. I couldn't even compare to see if I was doing it wrong because it seems to be the sort of thing that everyone writes about but no one practices.
More so, I absolutely wouldn't want to use a new third party app for my knowledge repository. Who knows wether or not it'll still be in development or even supported in a year.
I used Trello with relatively good results. The process was:
1. Create a board with a single “Dump” column
2. Create cards in the Dump column (or “share” to the column whenever I read something online)
3. Every week, categorise the card into new columns. Each column was a broad category like “Philosophy” and “Startup ideas”
4. When the board became unwieldy, with too many columns, I created a new board (Philosophy) and split the categories/columns again (Stoicism and Nihilism)
The act of reorganising the board was super useful for remembering everything, a bit like spaced repitition
I've been using TiddlyWiki for almost a year. Most of my 400 Tiddlers are either code snippets with explanations or an probably ~2 paragraphs of text on average. I haven't experienced any galaxy brain type moments. The search is good enough, I can add and link to images, and it supports KaTeX for math. Those are probably the killer features for me.
If anything, I'd love to switch to something that let me work on iOS natively, but I've been happy enough to not look too hard for anything else.
Perhaps I went about it all wrong, but I loved the theory but didn't find the particular application useful. I also found absolutely no examples of a real life Zettelkasten online anywhere. None. I couldn't even compare to see if I was doing it wrong because it seems to be the sort of thing that everyone writes about but no one practices.
More so, I absolutely wouldn't want to use a new third party app for my knowledge repository. Who knows wether or not it'll still be in development or even supported in a year.