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 up files on disk. But you do not need to use a specific editor to write your rookeries; you can author the Typst files in it however you prefer. Another way of thinking about rookery is that it is more opinionated than Obsidian and Notion in that it requires you to think with ideas. To some degree, it is also less opinionated than Zettelkasten in that it doesn’t enforce or require strictly atomic notes.
Three ways of thinking about note systems have directly 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.
The sense of an idea as the base for more structured kinds of notes such as todos is one of the reasons that rookery ships #tagged-idea, a factory (curried) function that projects can use to create #todo or other kinds of more structured ideas. Though there is no inbuilt sense in rookery that allows one idea to depend on or be blocked by another, for example, you could augment these more principled ideas using tags as a metadata system.
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 concieved, whereas forester must be adopted wholesale.x) that was announced in August 2026.Kodama is another forester-inspired tool for authoring intellectual junkyards in Typst.