I’ve written about Denote before but those posts were usually about advanced features that Prot, the author of Denote, was working on. If you don’t know anything about Denote, those other posts may not have meant a lot to you.
Emacs Elements to the rescue. He has a short video called Emacs Note Taking Recommendation that’s a brief introduction to Denote for those with no experience with the app. Unlike the advanced features that Prot talks about in his videos, this video shows how easy it is to get started with Denote. There are only a few commands that you need to know to start using it effectively.
One of it’s really nifty features is the ability to import existing notes into Denote. When you do that, Denote will use the existing file date when renaming the file. It can also add the appropriate metadata, such as tags, to the file. Take a look at the video for the details.
One of the most useful things I learned from the video is dired-narrow-regexp. It’s part of the dired-narrow package and does just what its name says. You specify a regular expression in a Dired buffer and it will narrow the buffer to files matching the regexp. It’s very handy, especially since I already had the dired-narrow package installed.
The video is only 4 minutes, 16 seconds so you should not have a problem finding time for it. It’s a good introduction to Denote and worth a few minutes of your time.