Thanks!

You are welcome!

You are welcome!

You are welcome!

You are welcome! I am happy to share what I learn and help others that way. It is part of the spirit of libre software to spread the knowledge.

Thanks!

You are welcome! And I am happy to have received the feedback I did from the community. It helped refine some important aspects of the package at this early stage.

You are welcome!

Thank you! I think portability is important. Even though I use Emacs full-time, I consider it irresponsible to tie my long-term storage to one program. As for your woes with LSP and related, I am afraid I cannot be of help: I don't use any of those as I only program in Elisp (and shell once in a while). Maybe some framework like Doom Emacs has these things sorted out?

Thank you!

You are welcome! About the multiple directories part, it is possible to use a directory-local variable set to either 'local' or 'default-directory'. All Denote commands within that directory will assume it as the one that holds your notes. This section of the manual mentions it and shows how: protesilaos.com/emacs/denote#h:f34b172b-3440-446c-aec1-bf818d0aabfe Maybe we can implement a better solution, though this one should work too.

@@protesilaos I will test this solution first before I try and make another. Thanks.

You are welcome! If you try denote, please share any feedback you may have. I was not familiar with howm. Will read more about it.

Thank you! Experiment with different packages and see what works for you.

Sure! There shall be a video about it next week (unless something major happens). Though it will be mostly philosophy than technology, meaning that I will talk about the method.

@@protesilaos Thanks for the quick response! Sure it's much better to talk about philosophy than learning a particular tool.

By the way Prot, did you read the "Smart Notes" book on Zettelkasten? If not, I recommend it for some interesting ideas.

@Stefan Kangas I haven't. Will look it up.

I do have one query, what inspired the use of front matter, if seemingly all of the information is contained within the filename?

Thank you! Just to focus on your issue with notes: I used to feel the same way. This sense that I am missing that one "special thing" or "hidden secret" or "killer app" which will take my productivity to new heights. Here is a video from last year about "the second brain and mindfulness": protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-08-31-emacs-second-brain-mindfulness/. In practice, I wasn't getting much value out of the tools I was using because I was lacking the method. Like you, I had random snippets of the "this might be useful one day" type. Over time I accumulated so much without actually remembering any of it. What's the point of having all those searching and filtering tools that the computer provides if we still have no notion of the underlying stock of information? So I decided to take a step back and think critically about how I take notes and, most importantly, what is worth capturing and what isn't. [ What is true for note-taking it true for being mindful in life at-large. ] To me, records of all the minutia are worthless because even if I add them up the insights I gather from them are still devoid of added value. Like "today I took a walk from the north side of my village southwards and back". The more useful notes are those that you put some effort into and can actually teach you something. As your teacher in primary school would say "describe it in your own words". When you reflect on something you thought/read/experienced and use your own way to document your impression of it or reaction to it, you are focusing your mind and are learning something outright. Spend 10, 30, 60 minutes working on it. The quick-capture-and-forget-about-it approach is not adding to your knowledge. As you keep being deliberate, you deepen and/or broaden your understanding of the matter at hand. Here is a rule of thumb to quickly assess if something is worth committing time to: (1) can I remember it in 8 hours from now without a reminder?, (2) can I explain what I know about it at least as a first impression in, say, 300-500 words?, (3) is this something I see myself developing further? This is not a perfect test, but it already filters out whatever random piece of information you come across. Being more selective already makes you more focused. The rest is a matter of commitment. Practice makes perfect! Finally, regarding your question on the front matter: (i) it is a convenience to make it more human-readable, especially if you ever want to share your writings with others, (ii) it is helpful if you want to print the document, (iii) it is information that other programs can use, such as Org export, or a static site generator with Markdown+Yaml.

Wow, are you me? I'm in the same position as you! - A current org-roam user - I don't like the required database - I'm starting a new job! - Thinking to try another note taking system. Thank you for your comment.

org-roam is a sort of useless contradiction because the whole point of org is to have your data in the most universal of all the formats, plain text, so you can use it with other tools, if you bottle data in a database you are losing that. sql databases are useful when you can manipulate the database and make new reports, do you know SQL and does org-roam allow you to do so?

You are welcome! I only do them now if they are relevant to some package I develop. Otherwise I don't have time for them: I spend it maintaining the Emacs packages I have and, as in this case, creating new packages.

They cover the same niche. org-roam has enjoyed more development, has a massive community, and should "just work" for what it sets out to do.

I think Dired is one of the best features of Emacs. Though it is not mutually exclusive with the completion frameworks. We just use whatever is more appropriate for the task at hand. Nice stuff!

@@protesilaos I haven't really felt motivated to use dired until I saw some of your videos. Nice stuff, indeed!

Thank you!

Thank you!

You are welcome!

Σ'ευχαριστώ!

You are welcome! This reminds me of the days when I would manually do the parts that Denote now streamlines...

You are welcome!

Thanks!

You are welcome!

Thank you! What you describe is not available right now. We can, in principle, implement it though we need to consider various scenaria to make sure it always does the right thing and is consistent with what we have. Please report an issue on the mailing list or either of the mirrors on GitHub/GitLab and we will discuss the technicalities from there.

Hello there! I have some videos with a dark background. Then I get the opposite suggestion: to use a light background because it works better during the day and/or in an open space, etc. Maybe it would help if you reduced the brightness of your monitor? Also keep another source of light in the room?

I see this issue a lot, and with static content like websites you can already switch between dark and light mode. I wonder if someday someone will come up with dark/light-switchable videos (either different video streams but much more likely have part of the frame be color-inversion-friendly) to resolve this! (Maybe this is over-engineered, however)

I used to follow this practice for years before streamlining it. I was originally inspired by my Jekyll-powered blog where each post has a pattern of YYYY-MM-DD-TITLE.md. I kept refining it from there. To your questions: - Last modified: I use Git for my notes. If I make a change to a file, I record it. I can then see its entire history from there. Otherwise, I do not use a "last modified" header because that would still not tell me which parts were edited and which ones weren't. - The file-naming scheme I use has two distinct field separators which give us filtering keys for free: "-word" matches part of the title field, while "_word" is a keyword/tag. Thus, even with no use of regexp we still get an effective way to narrow the list.

For simple reminders and stuff, I use Org mode with a basic capture template. Though Denote can work for that use-case as well. It is a matter of how you prefer to organise your data.

The identifier will be incremented by 1 until there is a unique one.

The text in the file is not needed by Denote. It is for other programs to use. For example, Org sets the tags for each heading.

The comma is the default value. I just leave it as-is. EDIT: Also because the space is very useful for separating search terms of the 'orderless' package.

For the convenience of copy-pasting and using grep.

Hi! Just saw your comment. We are already dealing with the duplication on the GitHub mirror. About the "import", check the latest commits to denote-dired.el. We now have bulk renaming for marked files in Dired. But yeah, I am fine if we can expand on this idea.

You are welcome! There are no such user options at this stage. There are variables, such as 'denote-org-front-matter' which cover this use-case. The doc string of 'denote-org-front-matter' explains the details. The equivalent variables for the other supported file types are 'denote-toml-front-matter', 'denote-yaml-front-matter', and 'denote-text-front-matter'. Please check the official sources of Denote for the relevant communication channels, as I might miss something here.

No the link titles are not updated in that case. Though the link should still work.

Sounds like a good job for Dired. Type 'C-u M-x dired-sort-toggle-or-edit' ('C-u s' by default) to edit the flags for 'ls'. Append '--sort=time' (without the quotes). If you need to reverse the sort, add the '-r' flag as well.

It is the 'keycast' package.

Actionable buttons for Markdown and plain text are coming soon before version 0.1.0 is released (and the package becomes available). I now finalising some details and will test things further.

No, it only works Emacs 28 or higher. Porting it to Emacs 27 requires a lot of testing (and compatibility code) that I cannot do right now.

I don't know. I never used zetteldeft. I also did not claim that Denote is better than its alternatives. In general, I think that if something works perfectly for you, there is no reason to change it.

@@protesilaos True , I recommend before embarking on a project, check other ones, so you don't build something that exists from scratch. Even better, build on top of what is already there, to improve it. Efforts must be spared!

@@Jdonovanford Fair point and thanks for taking the time to write this! I agree and generally follow this guideline. With Denote specifically, I have been using it in various forms for years, even before I started using Emacs (mid-2019). As for the part about contributing to an existing package, it is correct except it only applies fully to accomplished programmers. Whereas I am learning to program by writing code such as this one. A relevant quote from Denote's manual where it addresses Frequently Asked Questions: Start quote The existence of PACKAGE is never a good reason for me not to conduct my own experiments for recreational, educational, or practical purposes. When the question arises of "why not contribute to PACKAGE instead?" the answer is that without me experimenting in the first place, I would lack the skills for such a task. Furthermore, contributing to another package does not guarantee I get what I want in terms of workflow. Whether you should use Denote or not is another matter altogether: choose whatever you want. End quote

@@protesilaos Fair enough, I agree completely.

I still haven't found the one I prefer the most, but this one may be it. My problem is with the hardware: it adds too much sharpness to the picture.

I like it!

@@protesilaos This is also excellent for diffs with git

@Phaedrus mg Agreed! I have been using auto-fill-mode and M-x fill-paragraph (M-q by default) for a long time now. They too are good for diffs. Though semantic line breaks add an interesting element to plain text.

I have heard about recutils, but never used them. Will give them a try some day.

That's okay!

he never said there's anything wrong with it, he just said i will use org when i need the extra functionality, otherwise i just use text. which is pretty much the same as using the right tool for the job

I'm not sure you've convinced me you're genuinely sorry.

@Ernest M. van der Linden - There was a panellist recently on HBO's Real Time, who made a point of how divisive Twitter is. He then cited a tweet where someone posted that he had just woken had some pancakes because 'their so good.' Someone then replied, 'So whats wrong with waffles?' So Mr Ernest M. van der Linden what was wrong with black and white people living together? After all your forefathers invented the apartheid system, so here is you chance tell us all what is wrong with the normal system of living together, or do you like to divide people as you do with opinion.

@Matt Moore - You gotta point. @Ernest M. van der Linden' is just being a c**t. He is taking time out from watching kiddie porn and is bit confused. @Ernest M. van der Linden - DON'T START ON PROT!!!! Got it..instead read what @Ahmed Tarek said, he put it very well.

No. It's just a play on "note" and the ordinary word "denote".