Implement a trash or automatic note archive in The Archive with special tags

ctietze

Hey folks,

First, a disclaimer: This is not how I use the app, or how you should be implementing the Zettelkasten Method. But it's something the app can do if you don't care for all that.

With the recent "Cutting Edge" update, more special characters are recognized as part of tags, so you can use parentheses to provide additional data that external scripts can process.

A few suggestions from an email conversation the other day:

• ##obsolete(2018-04-19) to mark a note like vacation plans or errands list as "done". (##obsolete:2018-04-19 can work, too, if you prefer that format)
• ##trash(2018-04-19) to mark a note as pending removal

Then you need to write the archival and removal scripts yourself, though. Like:

• Run a maintenance script daily to move notes that were obsoleted e.g. more than 10 days ago into an archive folder like archives/2018/04/
• Run a maintenance script daily that deletes notes that were put to trash 30 days ago.

Again, planning a vacation in a Zettel note doesn't make much sense, so all of this has nothing to do with the method but they work well with the app as a general-purpose note manager. When The Archive's scriptability stuff is implemented, I'm looking forward to play with this some more. For now, you have to invoke the scripts manually, using Keyboard Maestro or any other launcher, or schedule them with launchctl.

Saved searches can help filter for lists that were not yet obsoleted with boolean expressions:

#errands AND NOT ##obsolete

Or:

#meeting-notes AND NOT ##trash

This should produce a list of ongoing things only. Might be useful to implement Getting Things Done with multiple lists in The Archive or something similar.

Cheers,
Christian