Protesilaos Stavrou

🏆 I provide private lessons on Emacs, Linux, and Life in general: https://protesilaos.com/coach/. Lessons continue throughout the year.

Emacs: new Denote developments (version 2.1.0-dev)

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK4P5oIIEnk

These cover version 2.1.0-dev and remain subject to further changes ahead of the formal release.

The denote-link-with-signature command (I did it live)

This is what I worked on during a recent live stream about Denote. The idea is that the user wants to link to a file that has a signature and so only wants to be prompted for such files. These links include the signature in their anchor text in addition to the title.

The recording of the live stream is available: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-09-25-emacs-live-mostly-denote/.

The denote-region command

The command denote-region takes the contents of the active region and then prompts for a title and keywords. Once a new note is created, it inserts the contents of the region therein. This is useful to quickly elaborate on some snippet of text or capture it for future reference. denote-region also has a special hook. Everything is covered in the manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote#h:2f8090f1-50af-4965-9771-d5a91a0a87bd.

The denote-link-after-creating-with-command command

This command is like denote-link-after-creating except it prompts for a note-creating command. Use this to, for example, call denote-signature so that the newly created note has a signature as part of its file name. Optional ID-ONLY has the same meaning as in the command denote-link-after-creating.

There are more “… or create” commands, covered in the manual:

New hook after creating a note

The hook is called denote-after-new-note-hook. It is called after the denote command and thus all other file-creating commands that call denote internally.

Letter casing of file names

Control the letter casing of file names with the new user option denote-file-name-letter-casing. Also read: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-10-11-denote-letter-casing-option/.

Handle encrypted note files properly

Quoting from the Git commit log:

commit ecb5f8501b81584e886f5879a1ca368524bd14ab
Author: Protesilaos Stavrou <info@protesilaos.com>
Date:   Wed Oct 11 07:52:15 2023 +0300

  Add functions to return file extension reliably (also with encryption)

  We used to retrieve the 'file-name-extension' without checking if it
  was a composite of the file type extension (e.g. ".org") and an
  encryption extension like ".gpg".  Accounting for this scenario allows
  us to properly support encrypted note files, whose extension is
  something like ".org.gpg".

  Check the two new public functions, 'denote-get-file-extension' and
  'denote-get-file-extension-sans-encryption', for the implementation
  details.

  Thanks to Jens Östlund for reporting a bug with 'denote-keywords-add'
  on an encrypted file, which prompted me to investigate this further.
  This was done in issue 172 on the GitHub mirror:
  <https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/issues/172>.

  In short, we had a problem with all operations that needed to retrieve
  the file extension when that included an encryption component.

 README.org           | 27 ++++++++++++++-----
 denote.el            | 74 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------------
 tests/denote-test.el | 32 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 3 files changed, 100 insertions(+), 33 deletions(-)

Improved method of ensuring unique IDs

Not much to show here, just to acknowledge the work done by Jean-Philippe Gagné Guay, which builds on top of the code I introduced for this feature ahead of version 2.0.0 of Denote.

Denote journal extras

Check the manual about what this is about: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote#h:4a6d92dd-19eb-4fcc-a7b5-05ce04da3a92

Denote silo extras

Refer to the manual for further details: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote#h:e43baf95-f201-4fec-8620-c0eb5eaa1c85.

About Denote

Denote is a simple note-taking tool for Emacs. It is based on the idea that notes should follow a predictable and descriptive file-naming scheme. The file name must offer a clear indication of what the note is about, without reference to any other metadata. Denote basically streamlines the creation of such files while providing facilities to link between them.

Denote’s file-naming scheme is not limited to “notes”. It can be used for all types of file, including those that are not editable in Emacs, such as videos. Naming files in a consistent way makes their filtering and retrieval considerably easier. Denote provides relevant facilities to rename files, regardless of file type.

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