Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) is continuing to add new features to the upcoming release of Denote. The latest changes are about sorted listings of Denote files. Back in November, I wrote about Prot’s work on another new feature: dynamic blocks. Part of his latest additions also involves dynamic blocks.
You can specify a dynamic block of files and populate it with a sorted list of all the denote files that match a regular expression or have a given keyword. The files can be sorted on a number of criteria and are presented as links to the files. Once the block is set up, it can easily be updated as your files evolve by simply reevaluating the block. The idea is that dynamic blocks are used in what Prot calls “metanotes”. These notes represent a summary of other notes so having an automatically produced listing of links to those files is very useful.
But wait. There’s more. You can also collect the file listing into a dired file. From there you can do any of the usual dired operations. Again, you can specify the files to be included by a regular expression or keyword.
These changes are already in the development version of Denote and Prot says that they will be officially released in Version 2.2 sometime in December. If you’re a Denote user, this is something to look forward to. If you’re not, this video may be the final nudge you need to try it out.