ZettelFlow for Obsidian

ZettelFlow is a Zettelkasten toolkit for Obsidian designed to manage the processes of knowledge transformation rather than just managing notes. It treats Obsidian as the storage layer and acts as a cognitive engine to evolve knowledge through four main pillars:

• Knowledge Lifecycle: Tracks the state of ideas (e.g., fleeting → permanent → evergreen) and proposes the next logical step in the lifecycle.
• Semantic Knowledge Graph: Enables reasoning-based queries, such as finding ideas that contradict a specific note.
• Knowledge Discovery: Surfaces unexpected connections, ideas to challenge, or hidden structures within your notes.
• Knowledge Health: Measures the maturity and richness of your knowledge (e.g., knowledge debt, maturity, or idea heatmaps) rather than just note volume.

Key Principle: AI is treated as a tool for suggestion, not an autonomous agent. When AI is enabled, it proposes actions that you must manually accept, edit, or reject, ensuring you maintain control over your work.

ZettelFlow is a comprehensive Zettelkasten workflow toolkit for Obsidian that goes beyond simple note templating. It provides tools for capturing, cultivating, and managing a slip-box through several specialized surfaces and actions. Key capabilities include:

• Quick Capture: A single-keystroke command to write fleeting notes directly to your Inbox.
• Cultivate: A guided thinking session to evolve ideas through connection, challenging, and lifecycle advancement.
• Ask your graph: A deterministic query surface to find notes using predicates like state:permanent, relation:contradicts, degree>=5, orphan, unsourced, or older-than:30.
• Slip-box Health: Monitoring connectivity, knowledge debt (0–100 score), and identifying orphans or dead-ends.
• Note Lifecycle Management: Moving notes through states (🌱 fleeting → 📝 literature → 💡 permanent → 🔬 developing → 📚 evergreen → 🪦 archived) using the Change note state command.
• Relationship & Research Actions: Tools to create semantic relation (e.g., supports, contradicts), extract claims, and find sources.
• Visual Workflows: Using a visual language (WHEN / IF / ACTION / WAIT) on the canvas to create reactive, human-in-the-loop flows.

ZettelFlow settings are organized by functional activity rather than feature chronology. The settings panel is divided into eight primary groups. Understanding these groups helps you locate specific configurations for your workflow:

1. Your flows: Manages canvases with roles, the gallery, and bound triggers.
2. Creating notes: Controls drafts, builder friction, density, color by phase, target folders, and title prefixes.
3. Your vault's vocabulary: Manages excluded folders, lifecycle properties, and inline relations.
4. Thinking: Configures cultivate, judgement, patterns, the journal, and the timeline.
5. AI: Contains all AI-related settings (off by default).
6. Automation: Manages property hooks.
7. Advanced: Contains internal file locations, script type declarations, and logging (folded by default).
8. About: Displays version, documentation, and support information.

Additionally, a status line at the top of the panel provides real-time derived facts about your current state (e.g., active canvas, AI provider, thinking friction status, property hook count, and current log level).

ZettelFlow is designed with a privacy-first approach, collecting no telemetry and transmitting no personal data or vault contents. Most capabilities are opt-in or strictly local.

Key privacy behaviors:

• No Telemetry: No analytics, crash reporting, or phone-home mechanisms.
• Local Storage: Sensitive data like inquiry checkpoints, note-builder drafts, and the thinking-heatmap journal are stored locally in the plugin's data.json and are never transmitted.
• AI Privacy: AI actions are off by default. When enabled, note content is sent only to the HTTPS OpenAI-compatible endpoint you configure. AI completions are treated as 'proposals' that require your explicit acceptance before being written to a note.
• Clipboard: The plugin only performs writes to the clipboard (e.g., via 'copy' buttons for JSON configurations); it never reads from your clipboard.
• Diagnostics: Error logs for indexing are content-free, recording only fixed failure categories (e.g., TypeError) and never note paths or bodies.

The Home dashboard displays several dynamic widgets derived from your vault model:

• Greeting & Thinking Streak: Shows how many distinct days you have developed ideas, based on your development journal.
• 3D-graph teaser: A shortcut to the Graph surface → 3D mode.
• Growth nudge: Displays the number of state: fleeting notes ready for development. Clicking it jumps to the latest capture.
• New ideas: A list of notes created within the last 7 days.
• Main concepts: Your most well-connected notes, sorted by degree in descending order.
• Deserves a review: Hubs (notes with degree ≥ 5) that have not been touched for 30+ days.
• Suggested connections: Unlinked notes that share context (based on morning discoveries).
• Pinned queries: Live cards for any Ask your graph queries you have pinned. Shows how many notes match the query; clicking it reopens the query interface.
• What to do next: The top ~5 KnowledgeRecommendations by priority (e.g., resolve a contradiction, add a source, connect this idea). Clicking a note row navigates to that note. If no actions are available, it displays "you're all caught up."

Note: Home is a read-only surface. It writes nothing and operates fully offline.

ZettelFlow is a Zettelkasten toolkit for Obsidian that uses Obsidian's native Canvas as a workflow engine. It focuses on 'knowledge with purpose' through guided thinking sessions, offline graph analysis, and human-in-the-loop automation.

Core Capabilities

• Canvas-based flows: Use Obsidian Canvas to build workflows without learning a custom DSL.
• Knowledge Patterns: Templates that run automated actions (e.g., finding contradictions, suggesting links) upon note creation.
• Scriptable Knowledge API: Access the zf.knowledge and zf.ai.propose() APIs via JavaScript to build custom logic.
• Built-in Actions: Over 30 actions covering Prompt, Checkbox, Tags, Backlinks, and specialized Knowledge, Relation, Research, and AI actions.
• Workflow Control: Supports conditional edges (branching logic), step-based exits, and 'roles' (defining if a canvas creates notes, edits the open note, or runs on events).
• Health & Insights: Tools like ZettelFlow Home, Slip-box health, and Agency review provide read-only, offline insights into your knowledge debt, connectivity, and decision-making patterns.