User Guide

Getting Started

OikoNotes is a personal knowledge management system built around the Zettelkasten method. It helps you capture fleeting thoughts, process them with AI assistance, and organise them into a permanent knowledge base connected by wikilinks.

The Core Workflow

Every note flows through three stages:

1. Capture — Quickly jot down ideas, voice memos, photos, or files into the Inbox. No need to organise yet.
2. Process — Visit the Process Queue to triage notes. AI analyses each capture and suggests titles, tags, links, tasks, events, and even the best note type.
3. Publish — Once a note is refined, publish it to the web. Public notes go live on your site without changing their note type.

Note Statuses

Every note carries a status that tracks where it is in your workflow:

Zettelkasten Concepts

OikoNotes embraces the Zettelkasten note-taking method, which distinguishes between different types of notes:

• Fleeting notes — Quick, temporary captures of ideas or information. These are raw material to be processed later.
• Literature notes — Notes taken while reading or consuming content from external sources. They capture key ideas in your own words with source attribution.
• Permanent notes — Synthesised, atomic ideas written in full sentences. Each permanent note should contain exactly one idea and link to related notes.
• Index notes — Hub notes that serve as entry points into a topic, linking to relevant permanent and literature notes.

Beyond Zettelkasten

OikoNotes also supports practical everyday categories for tasks, todos, shopping, food diary, budget entries, and calendar events. Formal layouts such as meetings, recipes, project briefs, and reference notes are handled by templates. See Note Types and Templates & Blocks for details.

Zettelkasten Mode

The Notes area has two top-level views: All Notes and Zettelkasten. Open /notes?mode=zettelkasten when you want to focus only on your long-term knowledge base.

• All Notes is the broader library view with search, filters, tags, and collections.
• Zettelkasten narrows the view to permanent, literature, and index notes.
• Use the overview badges to jump to permanent notes, literature notes, index notes, or orphan notes.
• Use the built-in Health and Discover panels to review link density, find weak spots, and explore topic clusters.
• Use + New Index to create an index note that acts as a hub for a topic.

The dedicated Zettelkasten settings page lets you tune knowledge-management behaviour separately from the general notes view. See Settings for the related configuration areas.

First-Time Setup

When you first open OikoNotes, an onboarding wizard guides you through initial configuration:

1. Welcome — Introduction to OikoNotes
2. Appearance — Choose a visual aesthetic, colour theme, and editor mode (Block or Raw Markdown)
3. AI Provider (desktop only) — Select your AI provider and enter an API key, or skip to set up later
4. Vault Encryption (desktop only) — Set a master passphrase for encrypting sensitive data, or skip
5. Features — Toggle optional modules on or off: Calendar, Todos, Shopping List, Projects, Budget, Food Diary, Packhacker, Public Blog, and Explore & Knowledge Graph
6. Finish — A quick tour of key features before you start

In web mode, AI and Encryption steps are skipped (4 steps total). All choices can be changed later in Settings.

Navigation

The app sidebar groups features into sections:

• Capture — Inbox and Process Queue
• Library — Notes, collections, and the main knowledge library
• Organisation — Calendar, Todos, Shopping List, Food Diary, Packhacker
• Projects — Kanban boards for project management
• Finance — Budget dashboard and finance tools
• Explore — Study, Knowledge Chat, Graph, Explore, and Concepts
• System — Settings, public publishing, support, and this User Guide

Features you disabled during onboarding are hidden from the sidebar. Re-enable them at any time in Settings.