Folgezettel Heterarchy

Neuron allows you to organically build a Heterarchy out of your Zettelkasten over time. When a zettel links (see Linking) to another, it “branches off”¹ to that zettel … using Folgezettel Links#.

A folgezettel heterarchy differs from a traditional “category tree” in two key ways:

It is built organically over time based on the connections formed, instead of being pre-defined.
A note can have multiple parents.

The heterarchy is displayed in the following places

Impulse: Full folgezettel heterarchy of the zettelkasten.
Uplink Tree#: Subset of the above, branching off to the zettel.

Impulse
- Impulse displays a full index to your generated statically-generated Web interface. It displays the zettelkasten Folgezettel Heterarchy# for all Clusters# in the zettelkasten graph.
Uplink Tree
- An uplink is a special kind of backlink created using Folgezettel Links#. An uplink tree (aka. “uptree”) of a zettel is the subset of the Folgezettel Heterarchy# which branch off to the zettel. Uplink tree is displayed immediately above the zettel’s title; all backlinks of the zettel are displayed immediately below the zettel’s content.
Folgezettel Links
- Wiki-links (see Linking) may be labelled as “folgezettel” if you are writing a “structure note” (or hub note, or index note). Folgezettel links are used to curate a tree-like structure (termed Folgezettel Heterarchy#) for your zettelkasten, which structure is used in both Uplink Tree# and Impulse.
Directory Tree
- The Directory Tree plugin automatically creates a Folgezettel Heterarchy# reflecting the dirtectory tree of your notes. In effect, it does the following:
- The intention is to allow the user to define the bulk of their Folgezettel Heterarchy# using filesystem layout.
- The directory structure you have on disk is used to automatically create a Folgezettel Heterarchy#.
- This is one reason why it’s good practice to give your directories an Atomic and autonomous Zettel ID–once you’ve generated your zettelkasten, you no longer have the parent directories around to provide context, because the context is provided by the zettel’s location in the Folgezettel Heterarchy# (as can be visually seen in Uplink Tree#). The example from before, ./Home/Projects, would create a note for your home projects with the ID Projects–we can no longer tell that it is specifically home projects. (The other reason it is good to have unique IDs is to avoid ID clash, as covered above.)
- Even though the on-disk directory structure is discarded, the information it carries is preserved by Neuron when it creates a Folgezettel Heterarchy# between a Directory Zettel and its child notes/contents.
- The Folgezettel Heterarchy# is created from the level 1 subfolders. The index zettel will display its contents, but they will be non-folgezettel.
- Directory Zettles just being normal zettels also means that you can link and create any Folgezettel Heterarchy# you like with the zettels created from directory trees. For example, we could create a new zettel called Projects.md at the ‘top’ of our Neuron zettelkasten, to gather together all of our more focused project zettels, as a sort of gateway:
- In addition to creating automatic a Folgezettel Heterarchy# for each directory, the plugin also Tags the notes with their on-disk path, up to, but not including their own ID. So the note at ./Home/HomeProjects/HouseWarming.md would get the hierarchical tag #root/Home/HomeProjects. These tags always start at the #root tag.
Clusters
- Your Zettelkasten may have two or more clusters, not connected to one another. Impulse will display these clusters, with each cluster’s Folgezettel Heterarchy# rendered as a forest, whose roots (aka “mother zettels”) could be considered as a portal zettel into that sub-Zettelkasten.

Heterarchy#
- Folgezettel Heterarchy#
Graph visualization#
- A zettelkasten is a directed graph. Neuron also has an unique notion of Folgezettel Heterarchy#, which is a subset of this graph established by having zettels “branch off” to other zettels.
- Parent directory zettel

Folgezettel Heterarchy

See also