Limit Random Note to a folder

This would help create a learning system since you could include only notes that asked questions. Say I want to learn more about vim, I could ask “How to paste yanked text into ACK search” and then I need to answer the question. I could also link to Vim#YankedACK for the answer if I don’t know it.

As it stands, I don’t want any random note. Reminding myself of the best way to get my Gravel Bike up the mountain isn’t something I need, but that Vim stuff (or clearly other learning materials) would be great.

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It might be good to have a blacklist/whitelist functionality. So you could include multiple folders, or alternately exclude folders (for example, my daily notes folder)

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It would also be nice to be able to limit random note to a tag. This would be useful for creativity purposes, where you want to remix ideas.

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Love all the above suggestions, as options for the Random plugin +++

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Would absolutely love this function!

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This is a great idea.


For the implementation, perhaps the random notes plugin can use the search results list?

For instance, we might search for the tag #statistics and then press the random note button to get a note from the search results.

This way the random note behaviour can grow with whichever search features and operators are added to Obsidian.

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I’d absolutely love a blacklist functionality.

Basically there’s a non-negligent chance that clicking on a random note will open one of my daily notes.

I’d like not to edit the daily notes after the date has passed, so in my case, it’d be super helpful to just blacklist daily/ folder from the random note plugin.

3 Likes

This one functionality still stopping me to move from Evernote.

To resurface ideas is important, but doing it without limitations is a bit waste of time. Especially then you have big base of various notes.

It would be good to have a permanent setting, like exclusions or inclusions.

But I’d also love to see Random Operators, so that you could easily set and change the scope on the fly. Random Within Current Search like JkNML said. Random Tag, like lizardmenfromspace said. Random In Current Backlinks. Random In Folder(s).

But with an ability to easily turn off the filter or scope, and still see everything, when you want to. (Minus your permanent exclusions.)

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I think, using a filter as like as the graph filter will be a fit solution for all.
And for addition, there is an option on how many random notes are generated (so it’s like a global search result, but randomized).

For my use case example, It can help me to learn a language (I collect notes of the word). I can generate 2 random note from it, and try to quiz myself how to make a sentence from these words.

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yeah, it would be awesome to have exclude folders like my daily notes from random note

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Excellent idea, this would be super useful

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I love randomness. Controlled randomness is a concept I created to describe randomness from a selected pool of information. Uncontrolled randomness becomes less and less useful as the quantity of information grows.

Take Wikipedia’s random article option for instance. The likelihood of getting a result from your categories of interest is very very small. Controlled randomness in this case would mean being able to select your categories of interest and generating random articles only from this information pool.

In Obsidian, the randomness option could be contextual.

eg
Random note from folder
Random note from current tag selection
Random note from all visible graph nodes

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@danitrusca Now with the awesome community plugin Smart Random Note I think the plugin can do everything you mentioned, but I might be unaware of limitations it might have, for me it’s worked great so far!

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That looks awesome! Can’t wait to try it out.

Thank you.

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awesome! no worries, it’s a great plugin, to me it solves everything I needed out of the random note feature, specially using it together with search

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thanks. found what I was looking for.

This is what’s working for me:

-path:"areas/planning/daily notes" path:"areas" OR path:"resources" OR path:"projects" OR path:"archive"

1 Like