proposal: provide option for using UTC time

[lehmacdj]

I would like to use UTC timestamps for times in my zettelkasten so that changing timezones doesn't mess things up. Ideally this would make neuron create new notes using UTC time, and also interpret times in notes as UTC time wherever relevant.

Based on a cursory look at the codebase, it seems like everything uses LocalTime internally right now (e.g. DateMayTime). Probably the easiest option is to offer an override for the system provided timezone in neuron.dhall. This way one doesn't need to remember to pass a flag whenever using a zettelkasten using a different timezone than one's system defined one.

As far as implementation would go I would propose:

1. instead of passing the time in NewCommand pass Maybe DateMayTime
2. in newZettelFile fetch the current time as a default if there was no time passed via an option
3. use timezone specified in Config (via timezone config option?) for determining what timezone to use for when fetching a time

I would be happy to send a PR if you would accept such a PR.

Longerterm it would be great to have more comprehensive timezone support, i.e.:

• allow different notes to use different timezones for their date (i.e. by using ISO standard +0000 suffixes and parsing these appropriately)
• allow generating the static site using a different timezone than the metadata (perhaps using a command line config option) But these both seem like they would require significant restructuring of the DateMayTime type, so I am steering away from trying to address this before ever having made a PR to this repo :)

[lehmacdj]

@srid would it be possible to get some details on how this could be implemented as a plugin? It seems as though to some extent supporting time zones requires changing the data types used within the core? Specifically, it seems like it would require using either UTCTime or ZonedTime from Data.Time rather than just Day and TimeOfDay as DateMayTime currently does.

[srid]

@lehmacdj Sorry, I let this slip my radar.

Let's not worry about the plugin stuff. Your implementation approach sounds generally good to me, but isn't there a way we can avoid having to add a new config field? I like letting the full datetime value specify the timezone (+0000); if we do that, then we wouldn't need to worry about telling neuron.dhall as to how to interpret timezone?

[lehmacdj]

No worries!

Sure, we can avoid having a config field I think. We would

• write timezone by default when creating a new Zettel
• interpret any time without a specified timezone as being in the current timezone when parsing

[srid]

Sounds good to me. PR welcome!

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-------- Original Message -------- On Feb. 11, 2021, 11:13 p.m., Devin Lehmacher wrote:

No worries!

Sure, we can avoid having a config field I think. We would

• write timezone by default when creating a new Zettel
• interpret any time without a specified timezone as being in the current timezone when parsing

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[srid]

Closing per https://neuron.zettel.page/next ... to further discuss this idea, post in Emanote repo.

(In particular, in Emanote you can access any arbitrary YAML metadata in the HTML templates)