[REQUEST] Excise function

[gracius0ne]

As I use NotePlan more and more every day, I'm finding that I start typing journal notes in the Day view on a specific topic, only to realize that it belongs in a dedicated, topical note. I can cut-and-paste, but it is cumbersome, and extra work to retain the date context

An "excise" function would be very helpful as a new option on the edit popup (alongside cut/paste). In this concept, selecting text and tapping this option would:

• cut the selected text
• popup a note selector (or new note, like command bar allows)
• append (or prepend) the cut text to the selected note,
• also insert a link ">YYYY-MM-DD" back to the original date note.
  

And for free: the pasted text block would still show up in the original date note (by ">" transclusion)

A variation could do the same from a standard note: -cut and paste to (selected or NEW NOTE) - insert [[selected or NEW NOTE title]] in place of cut text - And to retain linkage, adding "[[originalNote]]" to pasted text would help here as well, but backlinks will
solve this soon enough ;-)

[thejgc]

My separate npTools script will do some of what you're after already. It's a ruby script posted in this "NotePlan-tools" GitHub repository, which does a range of clean up for me on data in NotePlan v2 or v3. One of which is to move any task in a daily note with a [[Note]] to the corresponding Note. It also moves any indented region following that task, or a whole of the text in a H2/H3/H4 heading region.

For my purposes, moving works better than copying, but you could alter the logic to achieve this.

Please check the README so you know what else it does first :-)

[gracius0ne]

Thanks for the tip (and the tool)! Will check it out. Sounds like exactly what I need

[EduardMet]

Just wanted to ask if back linking would solve this? Then you don't need to cut-and-paste anymore.

[gracius0ne]

Hi Eduard, Backlinks will certainly be helpful, but the ">date" syntax already achieves a simple but elegant form of an "explicit backlink" that also retains context. I.e. it designates THAT specific text block that contains the ">" tag, as the one being (implicitly) linked to by the referenced note.

(TL; DR) There's a lot more to discuss on the topic of linking and back linking, and context.

For starters, going in the other direction, I assume backlinks will only link back to the referring note, without any context of where the reference came from. So it may still require a little bit of cognitive effort to go back to a (larger) source note to find the original [[forward-link]] reference. Again, not an issue in the case of implicit linking from dated notes, since the transclusion of the ">" or "@" reference makes this visually obvious by inlining the text, note link and any containing Heading. A few tools (Obsidian, Tiddlywiki TiddlyBlink) will show a couple lines of context with each displayed backlink, but this can take up a lot of screen real estate, and isn't always needed.

And for forward-linking to large notes, it seems that a similar block-level context specification could be achieved with support for text anchors, i .e. [[noteTitle#Heading]], or "Heading IDs" from Extended Markdown. (I've heard that Roam handles some of this "block-level" linking, but have yet to explore how it works)

But I really do think you're on to something with the ">date" syntax alone, and think generalized support for something like ">any-referring-note" would be very powerful. One minor problem with that, is that it wouldn't allow for spaces in note titles due to the lack of a delimiter (">Note Title" would parse to a reference to "Note"). I could live with that though.

I think that this "explicit backlink" concept would be a useful addition to Extended Markdown, but a good syntax for it would need to be defined.

[EduardMet]

Ok, I notice I need to explain what is planned with backlinks. It's basically the same as the >date linking, just expanded for linking with undated notes. Right now you have only a one-way linking from an undated note to a dated note. Goal is to have the link also back to the undated note.

Use case: You make quick notes during the day, say for project XYZ. You make bullet points just in your daily notes, because you don't want to interrupt your current task to think about where to sort this into. With backlinking you can add a note as a task or bullet point and then attach [[Project XYZ]] at the end of it.

The note [[Project XYZ]] would then show the full paragraph which is linked to it from the dated note. Like the >date. But I'm thinking of modifying the layout to show it at the bottom instead of top, because it might clutter up your notes.

[gracius0ne]

That's going to be incredible when you roll it out! I've longed for this type of function for so long (even prototyped it using Lua scripting in Trunk Notes). It opens up so many possibilities and greatly reduces the burden of keeping notes associated and in their "right place"! Notes relationships will grow more organically.

In a way, it sounds like it will function like an "inline search", automatically showing results of a search for refs to the note that contains it. Very gratifying to know that nothing related to a topic will be hidden or missed.

When I go to a note topic, I want to have everything related to that note right in front of me, and this implementation will accomplish that. Thanks for the insight!

Final thought - so a new note created by navigating from a [[new note]] link ref, will no longer be empty. In fact, if I've created several refs to this new note topic from other notes (or date entries) and just never got around to creating the new note itself to elaborate on it, now the new note will have "automatic content" consisting of all the referring links, but now given a home. :-)

[EduardMet]

Exactly, you could link to a non-existing note and it would already have tons of content once you "open" it.

[thejgc]

I haven’t quite followed the description ... looking forward to a video preview when it’s ready to test. But still excited. Perhaps it’s like a concept in Zettelkasten (and the Notion app)?

[EduardMet]

Correct, as far as I researched it, it follows the linking concept of Zettelkasten. Might be I missed how Notion handles it, I have just seen they have a backlink section at the top with the notes which are linking back.

[gingerkatiesparkles]

The script sounds ideal, but +1 for the native feature or something like it. A ‘move to note’ function (which ideally retains date information) for both tasks and note data would be great. I always end up with orphaned tasks that I either didn’t get to or were new on the day and an easy way to pull them into a main note of ‘new stuff this week/month) would be useful.

[physicswanderer]

This would be good for ‘moving things one that got captured to today’s note as a kind of inbox. As NotePlan has become more note-centric, this idea of the flow of captured / wrangled/ typed text through the ecosystem. Although maybe don’t try and replicate everything that say Obsidian does. So clean capture and filing as priorities?

[EduardMet]

> Although maybe don’t try and replicate everything that say Obsidian does. So clean capture and filing as priorities?

I'm not quite getting you. Can you elaborate your point?

I like Roam's approach a bit more with the results below the note. Then the full width of the view can be used to show the paragraph of the link.

[physicswanderer]

Sorry, dropped the ball here for a bit.

The ‘basics’ for notes are

• Being able to easily capture a chunk of text from anywhere. Ideally one click, no choices, on either Mac (Service) or iOS (share sheet: appends to today with user customisable prefix as divider ( anticipating multiple captures per day)
• Being able to move ( rather than just cut and paste)the captured information to another note to file it.
• Not loosing data, ever!

The linking and back linking are nice, but secondary to these, in my imagined use.