Similar Command

zetl similar finds pages with names similar to a query string, using concepts/SimHash-based fuzzy matching.

Usage

zetl -d ./my-vault similar "zettelkasen"

Flags

Flag	Default	Description
`--threshold N`	12	Max Hamming distance (lower = stricter)
`--limit N`	10	Max results

How it works

zetl computes a SimHash fingerprint for each page name using character trigrams, then compares the query’s fingerprint against all pages using Hamming distance. Pages within the threshold are returned, sorted by similarity.

This is useful for:

Finding pages despite typos
Discovering pages with similar names that might be candidates for merging
Fuzzy lookup when you don’t remember the exact page title

Relationship to search

similar matches page names. Search Command matches page content. Use similar when you know roughly what a page is called; use search when you know something the page contains.

Usage

# Literal text search zetl -d . search "defeasible" # Regex search zetl -d . search "reason(ing|ed)" --regex # With surrounding context zetl -d . search "Cache" --context 100 # Case-sensitive zetl -d . search "SPL" --case-sensitive # Restrict to a subdirectory zetl -d . search "given" --path "theories/*"

Flags

Flag

Default

Description

--context N

Include N characters of surrounding text

--limit N

Max results to return

--regex

off

Interpret query as a regular expression

--case-sensitive

off

Require exact case match

--all

off

Search raw content (include frontmatter, code blocks)

--path <glob>

none

Restrict results to files matching glob

Implementation

Tokenize — split the page name into overlapping character trigrams (3-character windows)

Hash — compute a hash for each trigram

Aggregate — for each bit position in the 64-bit fingerprint, sum the trigram hash bits (+1 for 1, -1 for 0). The final bit is 1 if the sum is positive, 0 otherwise.

Compare — Hamming distance between two 64-bit fingerprints counts the differing bits

Distance

Interpretation

Identical (after normalization)

1–5

Very similar (minor typos)

6–12

Somewhat similar (default threshold)

13+

Likely different pages