rational for filename procedure

oryal

Good morning,

According to you thoughts and experiences, I was wondering what is the advantage of including anything else other than a UID in the filename of a note?

In a text editor (I use zettlr, I do not know how The Archive works), you can request to have the title - or the level 1 header - to be displayed as the name of your file within that text editor.
And with hundreds of notes (wich will happen you day ), I would not go through my zettelkasten folder, on my computer, to look for a note.

What is thus the added-value of having a short title or keywords added to the UID of my filename?

Thanks a lot

ctietze

If you feel confident that you can add titles some day later if you need to switch apps (honestly, LLM's are really good at that kind of one-time throw-away scripting) then I don't see a problem of not including titles in the filename.

In some way, omitting it is some kind of "lock-in" -- maybe not by Zettlr, but by your choice of using it this way.

Putting date-time/ID and title into the filename (in some cases maybe even tags) grants you more flexibility. But if you don't need it, that's not much of an upside

Will

I wonder what value is added and what is given up by putting UIDs in a file name. This might be more suitable in the YAML front matter.

oryal

Thank you for your answers, and I might not have been clear enough: I wondered what advantage there would be to have a file named UID-(title).md? Why not just UID.md only?
If my note has in its body a title, the UID, tags, there are ample information for any search. So why add any other piece of information in the filename, i.e. UID-title.md? Is there any advantage to that?

Will

So why add any other piece of information in the filename, i.e. UID-title.md? Is there any advantage to that?

It depends on the front-end software you use to interact with your files. It is usually programmed to expect a UID-title.md, Title-UID.md, or UID.md. This creates a form of lock-in that you have to accept when choosing a platform and application, making it challenging to switch. You are correct that search functions work when the UID and Title are part of the file. However, in the case of The Archive, the note list is generated from the file names, which is why the UID-title convention is required. Other applications have different, often incompatible, file naming requirements.

I'm not a zettlr user, so I can't speak to how it handles filenames.