Rookery builds on thinking about associative archiving that dates back to 2019. Its name and metaphor system derive from thinking about software in the age of large language models.
More generally as a knowledge management tool, rookery takes its cue from the Zettelkasten method, which was popularized in 2019 by Roam Research, and which has since influenced both Obsidian and Notion, two popular knowledge management platforms.
Of these tools, rookery is closest in spirit to Obsidian in the sense that it allows you to create and manage a local-first knowledge base using plain-text files on disk. Unlike Obsidian, however, rookery is not an editor or IDE, which means you can author the Typst files in it however you like.
Another way of thinking about rookery is that it is a Zettelkasten framework built on Typst that is more structured than Obsidian and Notion, but not so structured that you need to know anything in particular about Zettelkasten in order to use it. Rookery allows you to organize your thinking using ideas and tags in a way that is compatible with Zettelkasten and Zettelkasten-inspired systems like Roam, without enforcing or requiring strictly atomic notes.
In addition to those mentioned above, three ways of thinking about note systems have concretely influenced rookery’s design:
idea?An idea in a rookery can be conceptualized as an atomic note of sorts, which is why each idea is given its own standalone page. As with notes in other Zettelkasten-inspired systems, ideas that link to each other produce backlinks.
In addition to the sense of an idea as a ‘Zettel’ or note, you can also think about them as slightly more general kinds of ‘todo’ item, as in Org-mode TODOs. Indeed, the notion of ideas comes from the IDEA variant in Doom Emacs, a preconfigured cluster of plugins for the Emacs editor.
Rookery ideas are designed with structured extensions in mind. You can structure ideas into todos, meeting notes, or even application tracking pages.
Rookery was inspired by a range of existing knowledge management tools.
Forester is the open source system most similar to rookery, and also its chief inspiration. Forester is an OCaml engine that Jon Sterling develops to power his website. It is not wrong to think about rookery as forester reimplemented for and in Typst.
Both rookery and forester have:
The core differences between forester and rookery:
#idea blocks in as they are conceived, whereas forester must be adopted wholesale.x) that was announced in September 2026.Kodama is another forester-inspired tool for authoring intellectual junkyards in Typst.
Rheo is a typesetting engine based on Typst that is also maintained at the Free Computing Lab. In addition to providing an EPUB export option, Rheo can also register custom JavaScript and CSS from a package such as rookery.
While we make a best effort to keep the rookery package Typst-native, we can guarantee a better experience if you compile your rookeries with Rheo. A large part of this is because rookery’s implementation depends heavily on Typst’s experimental bundle export, which means that one needs various flags and specific configuration to compile a rookery with the Typst CLI.
Using pure Typst, your rookeries will certainly not get standalone minted idea pages, rookery-wide outlines, and the ability to compile to EPUB, and idea-href will always be none. Other aspects of the rookery may also not work. Using the latest release of Rheo, by contrast, rookery should work out of the box.