jeanphilippegg
commented
8 months ago I mentionned this once in the past in another issue, but I see the ID part of the file name as something that users should not really mess with. Its initial purpose was to allow linking between files. It would not even have existed in the file name if some kind of linking (that does not involve a database) existed. In general, I would recommend using title, keywords and signature for a note's meaningful data.
However, the identifier in file names have been made to be the current date, the manual refers to it as a date (as opposed to an identifier) and it is part of the front matter, by default. So we probably want it to mean more than just an identifier and I don't think it is that much of an issue to do so.
Starting from tomorrow, I will start making pull requests and try to remove restrictions in the file names, allow reordering the components, general cleanups to the codebase. I will look into adding a command to change a note's identifier. Such a command can be useful when doing some tests as well.
I have not decided in what order these will be done. It may be a few weeks for this function to be added.
mentalisttraceur
protesilaos
I often want to change the ID part of a Denote-style file name while reusing all of the logic in
denote-rename-file.Currently I achieve this by advising
denote-retrieve-filename-identifierto return the desired ID during the call todenote-rename-file. In other words:(
with-advicecallsadvice-addand its body in anunwind-protect, with the correspondingadvice-removein its cleanup clause.)Of course, this only replaces the datetime in the file name. For files with front matter, this does not update the front matter's
dateandidentifierfields. That would require much more involved code and I personally haven't needed it.My use case for things like this is:
I have a basic task list system based on Denote where each task is a note file. For scheduled-for-a-specific-time tasks I use the datetime in the file name to indicate when the task is to be done. For unscheduled tasks, I just use this to sort tasks relative to each other. (Here, I benefit most heavily from the automatic Dired refresh, and sometimes from the ability to do this from the task's note or to have the task's not open in the background but have the buffer refresh automatically. My code disables Denote's confirmation prompts in these "task reschedule" functions, so I wouldn't miss that.)
Fixing typos in the names of pictures or other files where I might need to manually type the date when first converting them to Denote's file naming convention. More generally: the more I go "all in" on using Denote's file naming convention for all sorts of files, the more relevant it is for me to have quick and easy ways to add, change, or remove the ID in a Denote-style file name.
It's nice to have as an option precisely because having it available helps me creatively notice future situations where it would be useful.
Importing my blog posts into Denote notes. Right now I have a lot of blog posts which were written before I switched to Denote, which only exist online. With my current setup, it's not extremely ergonomic to create a new note without even thinking about the date yet, and then paste in the post, add the tags, and change the ID to reflect the original publish date.
The benefit of going through
denote-rename-fileis I get all the other nice features: the visiting buffer renames to match, all Dired buffers that have the file's directory open refresh, and so on (with my other hack to enabledenote-rename-fileto act even if the file doesn't exist yet but there's a visiting buffer for it, a newly created note doesn't even have to be saved yet for me to change any part of its name - and with this hack, that really means any part of its name).Another way to look at it is that it's more consisten and universal coverage - every other part of a Denoted file name is changeable, and only in some possible uses (linking, etc) it's helpful that it be unchangeable. I prefer orthogonal building blocks: I have two-key-press keybinds for each of adding keywords, removing keywords, editing the title, and editing the datetime. Naturally I wouldn't call the latter for files I was already linking without accepting the overhead of finding and editing all the links or link rot from not doing so.