How to launch The Archive with a different directory, and with different set of saved searches

ctietze

This came up in a support email the other day: how do you work with different silos?

Say you have 3 silos that shall not be mixed:

• Dogs
• Cats
• Work

The following is a bit hacky.

Please be careful!

Don't run The Archive multiple times in parallel on different folders (which would be possible). They share settings!

To maintain different contexts, you can whip up launch scripts that select the right folder and copy over context-specific settings for you.

The saves searches sidebar is fully represented in this file:

 ~/Library/Application\ Support/TheArchive/saved_searches.plist

So you need to set this up for your context, then make a duplicate.

1. Set this up for "Dogs", then save a copy as saved_searches-dogs.plist.
2. Set this up for "Cats", then save a copy as saved_searches-cats.plist.
3. Set this up for Work, then save a copy as saved_searches-work.plist.

Now you have 3 saved search sidebar configurations backed up.

To 'restore' any of the configurations, replace saved_searches.plist (which is actually used by The Archive) with your context-specific copy.

Then launch the app.

• How to tell The Archive to launch with a particular directory: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2653/selecting-the-archive-directory-on-startup
• How to get the current archive folder (e.g. to back up saved_searches.plist to saved_searches-dogs.plist again based on the
  settings): https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2574/how-to-get-the-path-to-the-archive

Here's an example bash script to do this that you could store on your desktop as The Archive Dogs.command. Files with .command launch the Terminal app by default:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Replace sidebar with settings for Dogs
cp "$HOME/Library/Application\ Support/TheArchive/saved_searches-dogs.plist" \
   "$HOME/Library/Application\ Support/TheArchive/saved_searches.plist"

# Launch app with ~/Documents/Notes/Dogs/
open -n /Applications/The\ Archive.app --args -archiveURL "file://$HOME/Documents/Notes/Dogs/"

Repeat for Cats and Work.