• It's just a janky script in my dotfiles repo

This probably comes with the biggest "DON'T USE THIS" warning out of all my personal projects. Not only is it just a bash script among many in my dotfiles, I'm not even sure that it works quite right; just well enough that I get by and have no urgent need to sit down and make sure.

But what is it?
Simply, its a notes management script. Zettelkasten is a term for a notetaking system that you can find somewhere around one billion articles and blog posts about on the internet. I'm not so sure that the system I've currently landed on is exactly in line with the core principles of Zettelkasten, but it works for me.
It basically eliminates just enough of the mental overhead of notetaking and -keeping for me, to streamline the process enough that I can write fairly unimpeded.

I've used it for about a year now and I'm very happy with it.
Previously, taking a new note would involve thinking if I wanted it to be a simple quick thing or a long-living document. Should I use LaTeX or just Markdown; if Markdown, would I maybe want to reference a paper and would need to use citeproc and maybe have an extra BibTeX file, or maybe reference a global one filled with a whole bunch of references, ...

My zet script helped me simplify the process, mostly just by settling on some idioms for myself:

• Have a single top-level directory for pretty much all notes.
• Categorize them only high-level, mostly in terms of context (i.E. what context of my life I would share this with).
  For me this meant: public, private (roughly: diary), <school project>, work, cooking
• Have some simple aliases for fzf search commands (zet filesearch)
• Try to define some common idioms for images so I can quickly add a standalone image and still know later what it's from or about (basically: standardize metadata title and source)

Try it!

No, actually don't. If you're looking for simple notetaking, there's probably great solutions out there that do what this does for me but way better. Find something that helps you get started with an empty note quickly, categorize only minimally (maybe: publically sharable, work, university, personal/diary) to avoid analysis paralysis and find some solution to synchronizing across devices (for me this was just Git, but maybe Syncthing would work better for you).