Quick insertion of URLs to notes with type-ahead search (using Keyboard Maestro)

kaidoh

Here is another little tweak for The Archive using Keyboard Maestro. It is a slight variation of the workflow described in this post.

Use case: going "software agnostic" almost certainly results in the use of different tools to work with your notes. I know, you could discuss that matter philosophically, but down on earth I love using (to name a few) iThoughts for brainstorming oder 2Do for task management. Linking back from tool x to note y can become more complex.

Fortunately, The Archive provides a URL scheme to insert links that point to your notes (details are described here).

The following two macros provide a system-wide palette to insert URL-linkbacks to TheArchive

Macro 1: collect archive files

The logic behind this macro is described in the other post. It searches your archive folder and saves a list of file names for later use.

In modification to the other post, the "collect part" now gets it's own macro. The benefit is, that you can use the resulting list (saved in the variable zettelkastenFiles) in different macros. The macro updates the list every time a new file is added to the archive. Don't forget to adjust the two file paths to match your archive location.

Macro 2: insert URL to note in archive

Again, the logic is similar to the macro in the other post. It uses the saved collection to let you choose a file name (step 1). It extracts the UID (10 or more consecutive numbers in the file name, step 2) and inserts a URL in the form of thearchive://match/1108160947 (step 3).

Result

A (for my use case) convenient and fast method to glue notes to other applications that accept URL schemes and jump directly to them when I need to. It works like a charm in iThoughts or 2Do but should also work in many other apps (try cmd+k in Text Edit for example). The URL scheme also provides your UID in verbatim. So, as fallback, you can copy the number and do the searching by hand (as you would have done before using this macro ;-)

Downloads: Tag collector macro and Insert URL macro

ctietze

Again, very impressive work I think @Eurobubba will like this for his external link needs, too.

apoc527

Yep, I'm using all of @kaidoh 's KM macros for The Archive.

Eurobubba

Yes, very nice, thanks!