I've been using zetteldeft to manage my notes for about six months now. Recently I've been wanting to reorganize my notes as some of them don't follow the zettelkasten principal of one idea per note.

Okay, most of them don't follow that principal if I'm honest about it.

I wanted to slice up my existing notes into smaller files and then link them all together. In my mind the process would go something like:

  1. Highlight the region to extract.
  2. Enter a title for the new note.
  3. Emacs would automatically move the text to the new note and insert a link where it used to be.

Emacs macros are handy for this kind of repeatable behaviour, so I started recording with an example note.

However, I quickly ran into a roadblock due to zetteldeft's behaviour when creating a new note. zetteldeft will create a file, insert the title, and save the file name to the Emacs kill ring. This meant any text I'd copied would be overwritten by the note title.

I decided to abandon the macro method and use a dedicated function instead. I wrote a little function called sodaware/zd-extract-region-to-note that extracts a highlighted region to a new note: 

(defun sodaware/zd-extract-region-to-note (title)
  "Extract the marked region to a new note with TITLE."
  (interactive (list (read-string "Note title: ")))
  (let* ((deft-use-filename-as-title t)
	 (note-id (zetteldeft-generate-id title))
	 (note-filename (concat note-id zetteldeft-id-filename-separator title))
	 (note-text     (kill-region (region-beginning) (region-end))))
    (save-excursion
      (deft-new-file-named note-filename)
      (zetteldeft--insert-title title)
      (insert "\n\n")
      (yank)
      (save-buffer)
      (when (featurep 'evil) (evil-insert-state)))
    (sodaware/zd-insert-link note-filename title)))

(defun sodaware/zd-insert-link (note title)
  "Insert a link to NOTE with TITLE as its link text."
  (interactive)
  (insert (format "[[zdlink:%s][%s]]" note title)))

I use the zdlink protocol for my links, but the sodaware/zd-insert-link function can be modified to use any kind of link. Eventually I'd like this to be controlled via a variable.

I'd also like a function that returns focus to the original note after extraction, but for now I'm pretty happy with how things work.