Zettelkasten Forum

Home› The Zettelkasten Method

rational for filename procedure

oryaloryal
in The Zettelkasten Method

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 :smile: ), 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 :smile:

Comments

  • ctietzectietze

    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

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

  • WillWill

    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.

    Will Simpson
    My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    My Internet Home — My Now Page

  • oryaloryal

    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?

  • WillWill

    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.

    Will Simpson
    My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    My Internet Home — My Now Page

  • oryaloryal

    Thank you very much for explanation @Will ! Somewhere else in another post, you mentioned you changed your naming convention from UID-title to title-UID, was it for the title of your notes or for the filename? I am curious as I might change to Mac, and thus The Archive; if I can spare me some renaming sessions, that’d be great :smile:

  • WillWill

    This is specific to The Archive. Other note-taking apps have their own idiosyncrasies.

    Below, I show the difference the position of the UID in the filename makes in the note list.

    Initially, I used the built-in monitor on my MacBook Pro. The limited screen space crowded the note list, allowing me to see only the first dozen characters of each note's title. I had to expand the note list window to view the full titles, which limited the editor's space. Back and forth, over and over.

    Screenshot showing the default note list.
    201301271927 Transcendental idealism according to Sen.md

    Then I moved the UID to the end of the filename, and now I can easily identify which note is which. I've concluded that it would be even cleaner if the UID were included in the YAML file instead of in the filename. Now the alphabetical sorting tool works great. Sorting the filenames alphabetically, with the UIDs added at the front, isn’t helpful. I wonder why this option is included?

    This is what putting the Filename in front of the UID
    Siren Song of Brain Prosthetics 202103300546.md

    Will Simpson
    My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    My Internet Home — My Now Page

  • oryaloryal

    Awesome, I understand!
    But then, when you create a link between two notes, do you have your filename inbetween the double brackets [[filename.md]] that becomes clickable? Or does your link is only a UID that is not clickable but that you will copy-paste in a search bar?

  • WillWill

    @oryal said:
    Awesome, I understand!
    But then, when you create a link between two notes, do you have your filename inbetween the double brackets [[filename.md]] that becomes clickable? Or does your link is only a UID that is not clickable but that you will copy-paste in a search bar?

    The link is the [[UID]]. Because The Archive uses 'link as search', a link can be any part of the filename. The advantage of this is that all notes containing the link appear in the note list. It becomes an automatic backlink list.

    Here is a screenshot of the link [[202106082050]] (the filename is B-The Image Of The City 202106082050.md). The note list contains notes with the [[202106082050]] link in them.

    Will Simpson
    My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    My Internet Home — My Now Page

Sign In or Register to comment.