---
title: My Zettelkasten in Sublime
tags: [Note-taking, Zettlekasten, Sublime]
summary: The way that I have my Zettlekasten set up in Sublime.
---


In the [last post][] I talked about the general idea of the
Zettelkasten method for taking notes.  In this post I will outline
how I implement that method in [Sublime Text][].  First, I should
say that I write *everything* in [markdown][], so I won't be going
into all the general markdown tools for Sublime Text.  I'll do this
in a later post.

All of my notes are in a single folder with one zettel per file.  I
have saved a Sublime Text project with only this folder in it as
`Notes`.  This means that I can press `ctrl+alt+p` and type `N, O,
Enter` and be in my notes project from anywhere.  This will bring
up any open tabs and the window arrangement from the last time I
was in my notes project.  From here, I can press `ctrl+p` and begin
typing the title of any note and I will get a fuzzy-filtered list
of notes.  This means that I can go from working on my dissertation
to a very specific note in less than ten key strokes.

Each file name describes the topic in the note.  For example:
`Plato.md`, `Akrasia.md`, `Principle of Alternate
Possibilities.md`.  When I want to split up a note that is getting
too big, I create new notes that branch off the parent note by
adding a hyphen to the original name.  For instance `Plato -
Psyche.md` is a child of `Plato.md`.  This could, in principle, go
as many layers deep as I like, but I prefer to keep the hierarchy
as flat as possible.  It is often better to add a new top-level
note with a more specific title like `Frankfurt-Style
Counterexamples.md`.  Here is a sample of what the contents of a
note look like:

{% gist 94e4838fc0176ff11c19 %}

You will notice that I have surrounded some text in double brackets
like this: `[[Free Will Thesis]]`.  These are standard wiki-style
links to other notes in the folder.  This is not standard markdown,
so I wrote a quick and dirty plugin to make these links work in
Sublime Text.  You can get the plugin on GitHub [Here][].  It does
two things: (i) whenever I type `[[`, it brings up a filterable
list of all my notes and auto-completes the links so that I never
misspell them (pressing escape drops you back to the original
`[[`); and (ii) when the cursor is inside of a link, pressing
`ctrl+enter` will follow the link to the desired note *or* create a
new file with the appropriate name if the note does not exist yet.
To get this last part to work I needed to install the
[Bracketeer][] plugin.




[last post]: http://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2015-05-05-the-zettelkasten-method/
[Sublime Text]: http://www.sublimetext.com/
[markdown]: http://brettterpstra.com/2011/08/31/why-markdown-a-two-minute-explanation/
[Here]: https://github.com/dansheffler/MyWiki 
[Bracketeer]: https://github.com/colinta/SublimeBracketeer