Zettel identifier

00001006050000 · Info · (manual) · #design #manual #zettelstore (all)

Each zettel is given a unique identifier. To some degree, the zettel identifier is part of the metadata. Basically, the identifier is given by the Zettelstore software.

Timestamp-based identifier

Every zettel identifier consists of 14 digits. They resemble a timestamp: the first four digits could represent the year, the next two represent the month, following by day, hour, minute, and second.1

This allows to order zettel chronologically in a canonical way.

In most cases the zettel identifier is the timestamp when the zettel was created.

However, the Zettelstore software just checks for exactly 14 digits. Anybody is free to assign a “non-timestamp” identifier to a zettel, e.g. with a month part of “35” or with “99” as the last two digits.

Some zettel identifier are reserved and should not be used otherwise. All identifiers of zettel initially provided by an empty Zettelstore begin with “000000”, except the home zettel 00010000000000. Zettel identifier of this manual have be chosen to begin with “000010”.

A zettel can have any identifier that contains 14 digits and that is not in use by another zettel managed by the same Zettelstore.

Identifiers with four alphanumeric characters

In the future, above identifier format will change. The migration to the new format starts with Zettelstore version 0.18 and will last approximately until version 0.22.

Above described format of 14 digits will be changed to four alphanumeric characters, i.e. the digits 0 to 9, and the letters a to z. You might note that using 14 digits you are allowed a little less than 1014 Zettel, i.e. more than 999 trillion zettel, while the new scheme only allows you to create 364-1 zettel (1679615 zettel, to be exact). Since Zettelstore is a single-user system, more than a million zettel should be enough. However, there must be a way to replace an identifier with 14 digits by an identifier with four characters.

As a first step, the list of reserved zettel identifier is updated, as well as ways of client software to use predefined identifier.

  1. Zettel identifier format will be migrated to a new format after version 0.19, without reference to the creation date. ↩︎