Comments

• ctietze

  July 2018

  Hmm, shouldn't be too hard -- but that depends on the content of your notes!

  The nvALT tag converter I wrote doesn't try to be clever about finding a location. I suggest you start with a simple script that reads the file tags and simple appends the #hashtags at the end of the file. You can always place them elsewhere later. Fixing things as you go proved to be a suitable tactic for most changes to my notes so far. I never suffered from not converting all the things into a new format I came up with.

  If your notes are in ~/Documents/Notes, create a Ruby file in ~/Documents/tag_convert.rb:

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  CURRENT_PATH = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__))
  NOTE_PATH = File.join(CURRENT_PATH, "Notes")
  EXT = ".txt"
  
  TAG_MAP = {
    "#f" => "financial",
    "!lg" => "log" 
    # add rest here
  }
  
  Dir.glob(File.join(SOURCE_PATH, "*#{EXT}")) do |path|
    # get rid of everything but the file's name:
    # SomePrefix_foo.txt  -> foo
    name = File.basename(path, EXT)[/(?<=_)(.*)/] 
    puts "Converting #{name}..."
    tags = []
    TAG_MAP.keys.each do |key|
      # Pretty basic matcher, will match `!lg` in `XX!lgXX`, 
      # may need to adjust for word matching:
      if name.include?(key)
        tags << TAG_MAP[key]
      end
    end
  
    # Append concatenated list of tags to file
    open(path, 'a') do |file|
      file.puts ""
      file.puts tags.map { |t| "#" + t }.join(" ")
      file.puts ""
    }
  end
  

  Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
• tf2

  July 2018

  Thanks! I cobbled together a python script that did more or less the same thing -- maybe not quite as elegantly. In case it's useful for others, here's what I did:

  import os
  import time
  import datetime
  
  tag_dict = {
      '!bk' : '#backup',
      '!cn' : '#contact',
      '!dp' : '#prose',
      '!id' : '#idea',
      '!lg' : '#log',
      '!pr' : '#prose',
      '!qt' : '#quote',
      '!rf' : '#reference',
      '!rl' : '#running_list',
      '!rp' : '#recipe',
      '!tc' : '#prose',
      '!tl' : '#tasklist',
      '!tx' : '#prose',
      }
  
  path = "/Users/username/Dropbox/Notes"
  filenames = os.listdir(path)
  
  exts = []
  prefixes = []
  for filename in filenames:
      ext = filename.split(".")[-1]
      if ext in ['txt', 'md']:
          prefix = filename[:3]
          if prefix not in prefixes:
              prefixes.append(prefix)
          if prefix in tag_dict:
              nu_tag = tag_dict[prefix]
              print("{} gets tag {}".format(filename, nu_tag))
              with open('{}/{}'.format(path, filename), 'a') as f:
                  f.write(nu_tag)
              fileStats = os.stat(f'{path}/{filename}')
              create_time = fileStats.st_birthtime
              os.utime(f'{path}/{filename}', (create_time, create_time))
  

  As I often do with one-time scripts, I built it out in stages. I used the three lines beginning prefix = filename[:3] to create the keys for tag_dict, which I then inserted earlier in the script, assigning new tags.

  I added the last section (beginning with the first reference to fileStats) because I realized too late that appending all those tags immediately changed the file modification date for every note that I altered. That makes sense, of course, but I like to keep my notes in rough chronological order, so I tried to set the file modification dates to the file creation date (since I only rarely edit a note once I write it).

  Unfortunately, it turns out that the Mac keeps separate file-modification metadata that's used in the Finder (and in The Archive); my script doesn't alter that. I wound up using a simple utility (File Date Changer Version 5) from the Mac App Store to do it for me.