Keeping metadata/notes about files and directories

Keeping metadata/notes about files and directories

[Christoph Groth]

Dear all,

I just wrote under the subject “Re: Managing articles in org mode 
and collaboration”.  This posting puts the other one in a broader 
context.

While thinking about organizing articles, I asked myself: Wouldn’t 
it be useful to keep metadata/notes about *various* kinds of 
files/sub-directories/projects inside org-mode (or something 
similar)?

One example is a collection of programming projects.  Just like 
for articles, it would be useful to add notes and metadata to each 
project.  The same is true for many other archive-like collections 
of things that grow over time.  The same problems appear as 
described in the other posting (namely scaling and searching).

I know that there have been discussions about this in the past, 
and I know that there’s org-annotate-file.  Is there anyone who 
uses a scheme like this (for >1000 items, say) in practice?

Christoph

Re: Keeping metadata/notes about files and directories

[Darlan Cavalcante Moreira]

See the custom commands for the agenda in the manual. You can create a
command to do a search in specific files.

The framework would be splitting your big org file into multiple files
and creating a custom search that search only in those particular
files. Of course you would need to change this custom command definition
if you add more files, but with the idea of using one file per year from
the other thread that means updating the custom command only once an
year.

I didn't test this so see how searching in all of these files scale when
compared to searching in one big file, but I imagine it would be faster.

--
Darlan Cavalcante Moreira


Christoph Groth writes:

> Dear all,
>
> I just wrote under the subject “Re: Managing articles in org mode 
> and collaboration”.  This posting puts the other one in a broader 
> context.
>
> While thinking about organizing articles, I asked myself: Wouldn’t 
> it be useful to keep metadata/notes about *various* kinds of 
> files/sub-directories/projects inside org-mode (or something 
> similar)?
>
> One example is a collection of programming projects.  Just like 
> for articles, it would be useful to add notes and metadata to each 
> project.  The same is true for many other archive-like collections 
> of things that grow over time.  The same problems appear as 
> described in the other posting (namely scaling and searching).
>
> I know that there have been discussions about this in the past, 
> and I know that there’s org-annotate-file.  Is there anyone who 
> uses a scheme like this (for >1000 items, say) in practice?
>
> Christoph

Re: Keeping metadata/notes about files and directories

[Christoph Groth]

Darlan Cavalcante Moreira wrote:

> See the custom commands for the agenda in the manual. You can create a
> command to do a search in specific files.

Indeed!  That’s great, I didn’t know that this is possible.  The custom
agenda commands of type “search” also support more complex searches like
“-{author:.*burkov} semimetal”.  This solves my searching problem rather
well.

Does org mode support such advanced searches also in other places?  It
doesn’t seem to be possible for “sparse tree” views of a single file.

> Of course you would need to change this custom command definition if
> you add more files, but with the idea of using one file per year from
> the other thread that means updating the custom command only once an
> year.

This is no problem at all, it could be even automatized.

> I didn't test this so see how searching in all of these files scale
> when compared to searching in one big file, but I imagine it would be
> faster.

If speed ever becomes a problem, I’ll see what can be done about it.