Keyboard Maestro can help a lot with friction in many apps, including Devonthink.
For instance, here’s a date and time stamp in two keystrokes, F5 and F6 - August 24, 2023 6:39 AM.
If you want to pin a document, you could replicate it to your database’s local inbox. In my personal finances DT database, I use a tag Attn. An invoice gets scanned into the group it belongs to and has the Attn tag applied. When I pay it, I tag it with the day I paid it and remove the Attn tag. The Attn tag is my way of pinning bills I need to pay.
Obsidian is a wonderful idea. There is great friction, at least in my use cases, with certain plugins like Dataview. Dataview is highly regarded. I also found it finicky. In one case I could not get an example to run until I added an invisible trailing space to the query.
The only think I miss from Obsidian is the canvas feature and tagging is a decent workaround.
There’s already Devonthink menu commands (File/Insert/Date and File/insert/Time) that can be assigned to a keystroke via MacOS System Prefs. No need for anything else. Unless I am missing something, that seems the simplest.
Now if only there was something as simple on iOS…
I agree with you on Obsidian. And I am using it lightly, and only for its ability to link to other notes and content and capture a daily note.
DevonThink is the only app I’ve used consistently on every Mac I’ve owned. It is the only constant in my workflow. So I’m committed to making it work for the daily notes functionality.
One thing DT has almost nothing else does is linked annotation files.
I might not want to put Devonthink links in word processing document, for example, but I can add them with notes in the associated annotation. The same can be done for file types that can’t include comments, like audio recordings.
I have a daily journal created by Shortcuts in iOS. I have never considered linking it to the calendar. I know I could pretty easily do this, I just have to answer the question: why do I want to do that, other than it’s a cool thing to do?
It’s great to see this conversation evolve. Since there is no DT4 as of yet, IMO this kind of blue sky approach to comments and questions is reasonable. Also good to see @GJT333 offer the clarification suggested by @rmschne. The notes and note taking approaches has been discussed in various threads on the forum here. It’s always interesting to see how people approach it. Like many on this forum, I enjoy tinkering with and exploring new apps, but DT is my rock.
I take a similar approach to @DTLow. I create a daily note in DT. I drop files into DT (or groups of files) that are relevant to current research projects. I copy the links into the daily note and try to say something about how the sources are related to each other, how they might relate to current research, or what observations/takeaways I had. Sometimes the note/journal entry is very short, sometimes it gets complex. Ultimately this has saved me so many times when I’m working on a project and I search for key terms and DT reminds me that I have a number of notes on these themes. It’s no where near as disciplined and well integrated as Luhmann’s method, but it does pay off.
I have a variety of templates set up using Placeholders and the Templates folder in DT.
That being said, just for sake of variety. I use Obsidian from time to time also. I index Obsidian in DT. The indexed notes can be modified either in Obsidian or DT. This seems to work just fine. DT is a much more robust database management system than Obsidian. But if you use Obsidian to write files that can be absorbed into DT, why not? This is just like collecting a file from anywhere, be it a PDF, webpage, scan etc.
The other apps I use as sidekicks for DT are HoudahSpot for global iOS searching. And more recently Hookmark. These were advertised as part of the Winter and Summer Fest.
Would you be able to share the script? Is it already shared somewhere here? One of the useful things about Obsidian is that I can hit the daily note button and it will bring up the note or create it. Much faster than searching for it over and over again. Maybe the calendar link your script creates will provide the same functionality?
Script is listed below
Runs automatically at 8:00 each evening
Only creates record if filename is not already on file
My ‘daily note button’ is on my Apple calendar
Click to see script
This text will be hidden
set theDate to ((current date) + 1 * days)
set {year:yyyy, month:mmm, day:d, weekday:dddd} to theDate
set Jan1Date to current date
set year of Jan1Date to yyyy
set month of Jan1Date to 1
set day of Jan1Date to 1
set dayNum to 1 + (theDate - Jan1Date) / days as integer
set dd to (texts -2 thru -1 of ("0" & d as text))
set m to mmm as integer
set mm to (texts -2 thru -1 of ("0" & m as text))
set dayNum to (texts -3 thru -1 of ("00" & dayNum as text))
tell application id "DNtp"
set theTemplate to get record with uuid "EA711D51-A60A-409C-9D07-9814AD570E5C"
set theName to yyyy & "-" & mm & "-" & dd & " tbdJournal - ⭕️" & yyyy & "." & dayNum & " " & dddd as string
set myNotes to search "name:\"" & theName & "\""
if myNotes = {} then
set theGroup to preferred import destination
set theNewRecord to duplicate record theTemplate to theGroup
set name of theNewRecord to theName
set tags of theNewRecord to {}
set noteLink to reference URL of theNewRecord
tell application "Calendar"
run
set theSummary to "Journal " & yyyy & "-" & mm & "-" & dd
tell calendar "Devonthink"
set theCalendar to make new event at end of events with properties {summary:theSummary, start date:(theDate), end date:(theDate), allday event:true, url:noteLink}
end tell
activate
end tell
end if
end tell
Essentially the daily notes functionality boils down to a text editor (markdown based) that is a front-end client for DT. Another one of the ways of using DT. But a very powerful way of continuing to add, passively, information and context to what already exists in DT. And then DevonThink 5, we might end up with a personalized, interactive AI.
Also, DT uses MultiMarkdown and obsidian is well known to „improve“ on MD with incompatible inventions.
MultiMarkdown is itself incompatible inventions
That said, the Obsidian documentation clearly notes when something is only compatible inside Obsidian, the biggest example being block references. Not much they can do about that but given that Wikilinks are made-up syntax and not part of Markdown not sure why this is a problem.
@GJT333 you can almost always use Markdown-format links instead of Wikilinks inside of Obsidian and they work the same way. If you turn off Wikilinks in the settings you can still do autocomplete using [[ and it will still insert a Markdown-format link.
Your example of [[This is a silly wiki-link|This is what people see]] would be something along the lines of [This is what people see](This%20is%20a%20silly%20wiki-link.md) (has to be URL-encoded). This doc explains it Internal links - Obsidian Help
That’s actully very good point. It’s not often I need FCP but then I need FCP. That’s why I bought it.
But a subscription would not make much sense, so then I would not have what I need when I need it…even though I did spend money to retain the option.
