Settings, section by section¶

Open Settings → ZettelFlow. The tab tells you who it is and what is on before it asks you anything. After that it reads as eight sections, organised by what you are doing rather than by when each feature was written. Every row is still found by Obsidian's own settings search.

The top of the tab¶

• The header — the ZettelFlow mark and what it does in one line, followed by three small links: the documentation, what is new in the version you run, and how to support the project.
• At a glance — four cards that say what is on right now. Each one opens its section:
  • Creates notes with — the canvas your ribbon creates notes with, plus how many other flows have a role. It is orange when nothing creates notes yet.
  • Thinking — how many of the five Cultivate moves are on, and whether a move asks for your reading before it reveals its own.
  • AI — Off, or On with the model you configured and its endpoint's host.
  • Property hooks — how many run and how many are paused.

The cards are derived from your settings, never stored, so they cannot drift from them. - The section bar — one button per section. It stays at the top while you scroll, and marks the section you are reading. It keeps to one line: when the names do not fit, the sections you are not in show only their icon (their name is the tooltip).

A fresh vault: three ways in¶

While no canvas creates notes, a Start creating notes card sits under the at-a-glance cards. Pick one way in, and change it any time:

• Install a ready system — Zettelkasten, PARA, GTD, research… from the systems gallery, rehearsed before anything is written.
• Use a canvas I already have — jumps to Give a role to another canvas under Flows, so one of your canvases can take the Creates notes role.
• Just think first — no setup at all: Cultivate opens and you grow one idea.

The card goes away by itself once a canvas creates notes.

Flows¶

The canvases ZettelFlow can launch, and what each one is for. A canvas with a role is a canvas you can launch. Without one it is just a file. See your flows and their roles.

• Your flows — each canvas that has a role, as one row:
  • a tile coloured by its role: create uses the accent, edit green, folder orange, event blue, hook purple;
  • the canvas name and its path;
  • a dropdown to change the role. A confirmation says what will change before anything does;
  • Open, and for an exclusive role (Creates notes, Edits the open note), a way to drop the role.
• Give a role to another canvas — pick the canvas first; the role, and what it changes, come next.
• Systems gallery — Browse the community systems, or Manage the ones you installed.
• Triggers — the triggers bound to your event flows, each with its own switch. The folder event flows live in is set under Advanced, with the other folders.

Creating notes¶

How the wizard behaves when it builds a note.

Your knowledge¶

What counts as knowledge, and how ZettelFlow reads it.

• Kept out of the thinking system — What is left out — how many notes count as knowledge, then rules read as sentences (Leave out notes that… are in Templates, have the tag #draft, have type set to moc), each with what it leaves out; Keep anyway exceptions; and ZettelFlow's own folders, locked. A rule is built from the vault's own folders, tags and property values — nothing is typed — and says what it would leave out before you add it. Show the notes left out lists them. On a phone the editor is a sheet. Still found by searching Excluded folders. More in knowledge scope.

- Lifecycle properties — the frontmatter keys for a note's state, its created date and its last reviewed date, side by side. The defaults are state, created and last-reviewed. They are plain properties, so there is no lock-in. - Typed links — Parse inline relations also reads key:: [[note]] fields in note bodies. It is on by default on desktop and off on mobile.

Thinking¶

The pauses, the moves and the returns that make you think.

• Pauses — your reading before theirs. Three switches in one place:
  • Ask before revealing (on): Connect, Challenge and Add a source ask for your own reading before they show you theirs.
  • Ask for your reading before suggesting links (off): the same pause in the note builder.
  • Think before you look, in Explore (off): Explore stays quiet until you have written what you currently think.
• Cultivate moves. Five tiles (Connect, Challenge, Question, Advance, Add a source), each with its switch. The card heading says how many are on.
• Returns and the thinking space:
  • Days before a claim comes back — a claim you stated comes back once, after this long. The slider says its value (7–365 days, default 90). It is a duration you set, never a repetition algorithm.
  • Thinking space folder — where Think keeps your thoughts, outside the knowledge model. The default is _ZettelFlow/lab.
  • Re-run a pattern after the note is indexed (on) — so graph results fill in on the first pass.
• What ZettelFlow remembers — local only. Three tiles, each with its switch and a lock line that says exactly what is stored:

Nothing in this card ever leaves your vault.

Reading¶

How a book opens from the Library and how the Reader moves from one chapter to the next. ZettelFlow is filmed in one continuous shot: both choices are camera moves, never a cut.

With your system's reduced motion on, both are instant whatever you pick.

Under them, Look up and translate (#766):

AI¶

Optional. Everything works with it off.

• Enable AI actions is one switch, off by default.
• Once it is on, the provider's fields appear:
  • Endpoint URL — any OpenAI-compatible chat-completions URL. It must be https; http is allowed only on localhost.
  • Model.
  • API key — stored in this vault's plugin data and sent only to your endpoint.
  • Limits — characters sent per request (12000) and tokens requested back (800).
• Whatever the switch says, a callout states what leaves your vault: only the bounded note content of an action you run, only to your endpoint. AI never runs on its own in automations, and nothing it writes reaches a note until you accept it.

Step by step: AI provider setup.

Automation¶

Scripts that run when a property changes.

The Property hooks card has its actions on the right: the native properties pane, Property types, and Add hook. Add hook is the primary action. Each hook reads as one line: - what the hook is for, with when status changes under it; - the property's type; - a Paused badge when the hook is off; - Obsidian's own switch, and Edit.

See the worked examples.

Advanced¶

Where ZettelFlow keeps its own files, script declarations, logging and timings. Nothing here is needed to use it. The section starts folded behind the switch on its own head, because nobody should meet a log level on their first day. It remembers whether you left it open.

• Folders ZettelFlow uses — one grid, one cell per folder. Each cell has a folder search and a reset to its default:
  • Folder flows (_ZettelFlow/folders);
  • Event flows (_ZettelFlow/events);
  • Hook flows (_ZettelFlow/hooks);
  • Scripts;
  • Markdown templates (_ZettelFlowMdTemplates).

The three flow folders refuse a folder that is the same as, or inside, another one: a canvas cannot be two things at once. A path is checked and saved when you leave the field, press Enter or pick a suggestion, never on a keystroke on the way there. The Thinking space, Dictionaries and Book notes cells show their folder as read-only text (cut short with the whole path on hover), and each arrow takes you to the one place it is edited — the field itself under Thinking or Reading, ready to type. - Script type declarations — writes zettelflow.d.ts into your scripts folder, so an external editor knows the zf API. - Logging — Off, Errors only, Warnings, Information, Debugging or Everything. - Timings from this vault — a small table of what ran, how long it took and over how many notes. It is read each time the tab is drawn. - Frame meter — for developers, and for an iPad, where nothing else can time a gesture. While it is on, a page drag, a chapter turn, a shelf drag and the opening and closing shots are timed frame by frame. Each gesture gets one line: its runs, its slowest frames, how long it took to start moving, and whether it stayed within budget. The line also shows the screen refresh it measured. It is off by default and lasts this session only: nothing is saved, nothing is exported, and it is never on Health. See the motion audit.

The tab ends on one line: the version, the documentation, where to report a problem, and how to support the project.

For contributors¶

• One native tab, built from declarations. The tab is Obsidian 1.13's declarative settings (getSettingDefinitions): groups with headings, classes and visible predicates, plus render rows for the shell and the tiles. That is why Obsidian's settings search finds every row, and why a custom window would cost review score and be one more thing to learn.
• No search box of our own. Obsidian searches settings natively, and every row exposes its name and description to it. A second search would be a worse copy of the platform's.
• No launchers and no documentation index. The surfaces open from the menu button and the command palette; the docs are this site. A settings panel that launches and documents is a menu and an index wearing a panel's clothes, and it cost nine rows (#439). The one exception is the start card, shown only while nothing creates notes.
• The renderer is the real one. Re-renders run each row's old cleanup, then clear(), then render again, and finish with setChildrenInPlace(groups). The sticky bar therefore stays inside its own row (display: contents), the hooks' React root is kept across update(), and the row styles are written against .setting-group. test/support/settingsRenderer.ts mimics that order, so it stays tested (#659).
• Settings live in a window of their own (Obsidian 1.14). Ask the element for its animation frame (el.win.requestAnimationFrame): the main window's never fires while it is hidden behind settings, which froze the section bar's marker (test/architecture/popoutFrames.test.ts). And never name a field navEl on a settings tab — that is the tab's own entry in Obsidian's sidebar.

README vocabulary for this page: Settings you can read.