Intro
Hello everyone,
Apologies if this idea has been raised before, couldn’t find anything despite a fair amount of searching. I’m not a programmer, so I’ll just try to describe the idea and hopefully someone can say if it can realistically be done.
Basic Concept
For improved retrievability, it’s helpful to link to a broad topic (MoC/hub note) when writing a daily note entry, but the resulting backlinks can become quite cluttered. It would be great if one could easily label certain mentions with “flag notes”.
This plugin would be helpful for this mindset: I want to capture this link/idea but I also can’t be bothered to think much about notes names or linking right now. I’ll just throw it in my daily note, link to this general topic it falls under, and I’ll deal with it later.
So a daily note might look something like the following:
(fleeting notes with good linking)
- This [[Running]] plan seems good to try after [[My First Running Plan]]
- (url)
(other fleeting notes with good linking)
- Running form tips from XYZ. [[Running]] [[Ignore]]
- (video url)
- (quick notes on video)
The plugin would deal with the Running linked mentions (from that daily note) like this :
- 1st mention: Shown as normal
- This suggests a TODO/to process/you haven’t distilled this yet
- 2nd mention (about video): not displayed
- OR: it’s been grouped under custom category of mentions (as defined by plugin settings).
So I’m not merely touching on the retrievability aspect, links are already good enough. It’s the ‘deal with it later’-stage that I think could use some help, perhaps more specifically for the gardener/archivist types among us.
No effort “Solution”: Select+Backspace Old Entries
The simplest solution would be to delete fleeting notes after processing them. With that kind of workflow you can then rely on the fact that daily note mention = TODO.
With the plugin one could have that kind of certainty while also preserving old entries/fleeting note structure, and all with very little effort. Maybe I’m totally out of touch with what can reasonably be done, we’ll see.
Extra Effort Solutions
Referring to processes that could more or less produce the same result, involving things like:
- Extracting a mention into a new note, put that note in some specific folder, hide all linked mentions from that folder
- Deleting/renaming links
- Make an intermediate note that can host processed entries, e.g. change links to Running (Archived Mentions) when handled.
- Use some advanced search plugin like Dataview
- Keep linked mentions as they are, but use sorting and visual indication (like checked boxes) for when an entry has been processed
- Any/all of the above in combination with hotkeys/templates/plugins to work slightly faster.
- See [[#Other Solutions]] for some specific alternatives I considered
My point is not these ideas are “bad”, just trying to say how nice it would be to avoid these things if flagging were possible. There would be less tension in trying to balance these wants; a) archive all fleeting notes b) thinking very little about future structure c) write freely and not worrying about backlinks as much (they are kind of their own tasks, don’t have to think about the whole daily note it came from)
Benefits
I’m not even very tech literate, let alone someone who can code, so maybe there’s a glaring issue with this idea, or maybe there are far too many possibilities to consider? I’m leaning towards this being the case. But if it is doable then all of this would hold simultaneously:
- Quickly associate linked mention preview from fleeting note with TODO
- Can assume idea has been stored but not processed yet.
- If custom groups of linked mentions can be made they are also tucked away, available should on want to see them. What I mean:
- E.g. if Processed Mentions is a flag note one could see in backlinks of a note: Linked Mentions, Processed Mentions,Unlinked Mentions
- Then with an alias recognition feature one could still use Ignore and such to be used as a flag for that group
- A setting for whether to collapse the group by default or not
- Quickly associate flagged mention in a fleeting note with DONE
- Can assume idea has already exists in some better form among permanent notes
- Can deal with entries individually
- Don’t have distill every link to MoC.md in Daily Note.md at once
- Flag is also a note
- Leave reminder to yourself about how the flag gets used.
- If plugin also recognized aliases then one could define aliases in properties and have a whole group of notes for the same behavior (Ignore = Processed = Distilled=…)
- Daily notes not deleted, they look the same, and they don’t have to be moved anywhere
- Maybe it inspires new ideas? Maybe you catch a mistake?
- Maybe there’s simply value in being able to recall the mindset at some point in time?
- Convenient that links are still ‘real’ and function
- Very low friction
- Especially compared to extraction, messing with folders, etc.
- Easy to undo
No aspect in isolation is very special, but I would love a solution where all of this holds.
Obsidian search function wouldn’t work for this
From what I’ve gathered it seems Obsidian isn’t “block-based”. This means one can’t ask the linked mentions search filter for blocks that contain [[Running]] but not [[Ignore]] . It will instead show notes where this is never the case, and so for that daily note example it would not display the saved running plan. Simply put, it’s all or nothing.
I can sort of understand this “block-based search not possible” aspect, but I feel like that just means we can disregard the native search function as an option. Clearly Obsidian can display multiple entries from the same note, so there’s something usable there, no? Once the mentions have been found can one not just tack on some filter logic to change their presentation?