Supporting YAML frontmatters for metadata

[mickael-menu]

Many Zettelkasten use a YAML frontmatter to provide note metadata, e.g.:

---
title: Improve the structure of essays by rewriting
date: 2011-05-16 09:58:57
keywords: [writing, essay, practice]
---

zk only supports title, we should support the rest as well:

• date for the creation date
• keywords and tags for tags
• unknown keys could be saved and indexed for targeted search

Neuron also supports unlisted: true which could be interesting to disable indexing of particular notes.

[jin-ahn]

Hi! is the last task something that is still planned to be added? I am looking for the ability to use custom YAML keys for my own notes and have zk be able to search through for them.

[mickael-menu]

I didn't plan to implement it yet but that could be interesting. Could you give me an example of frontmatter and how you would like to use it from the CLI?

[jin-ahn]

---

title: week 1
date: 2011-05-16 09:58:57
class: WR101
Professor: Dr Joe Smith
Reading: Smith 20-25
keywords: [writing, essay, practice]

I want to be able to do something where I find all notes from class 'wr101' or that have 'professor' as a keyword
I understand that technically I can just add Wr101 and Dr Joe Smith to tags or keywords to be searchable, but I also want the ability to categorize my notes based on certain custom fontmattee keys that it has (like my 'professor' example above)

[mickael-menu]

Would something like this work?

zk list --metadata "professor:Dr Joe Smith"

or that have 'professor' as a keyword

For this, do you mean that zk list --metadata professor should match any note that has a professor metadata, no matter its value?

[jin-ahn]

Yes to both! Some of my notes are for classes, some of my notes are for work, so they don't always share the same metadata fields. I want to search based on a metadata field as a way to "categorize" my notes

[lyndhurst]

Hi,
I am just wondering if this is still a planned feature.
Thanks.

[mickael-menu]

I don't have the bandwidth to work on zk anymore, so the project is in maintenance mode for now.

However if someone wants to contribute this particular feature, I'd be happy to help navigate the codebase and review a PR.

[lyndhurst]

Thanks for maintaining the application even though you are lacking the time, please keep it alive !

For now I manage to do my filtering with the regex match strategy. I have spent months migrating my notes to nvim and zk, and I am just starting to get into more advanced zk configuration. It might seem simple but there is actually a lot of possibilities there.

Anyway I do plan to try and get familiar with the code base for other aspects like fzf searches and actions, so when I do, and if I feel capable, I will keep your offer to review / help with a PR in mind.

Thanks again for your time and effort 👍

[gwicho38]

@tjex quick question -- is this issue and #446 closed as in 'will not complete'? Or was this functionality added?

If not, I'll give it a fair try since I think it'd be a nice thing to have and send a PR.

[mickael-menu]

#446 was a duplicate of this issue as it was mentioned first here. It's not implemented at the moment.

[tjex]

@gwicho38 That would be awesome! I have frontmatter fields ready to be served up!
Feel free to submit a draft PR too if you get stuck or are unsure about something.

[gwicho38]

Sweet. May take you up on that. Cheers!

[gwicho38]

Created an issue in my 'zk' fork since I don't think I can assign it directly from here.

[tjex]

assign what? This isse on zk-org/zk would be the place to discuss. And you can reference this issue in your PR.