Let’s say I’m a researcher. While reading a text, I create a separate MultiMarkdown document where I write down my notes. I like to include relevant metadata at the top of my notes document. For example, I might include a field like this where I record the date that I worked on a document:
---
dates: ["2020-02-13", "2020-10-05", "2021-06-25"]
---
Now I might want to find some notes I remember writing in Winter 2020 just before the pandemic hit. I’d like my search to return markdown documents in my database where the dates field includes a value that falls between January 1st and March 15th, 2020.
Is there an easy way to run this type of search within DEVONthink? Or are there other tools for the job that might be easier to set up (for somebody with only basic programming skills who definitely is not equipped to learn to write a custom YAML parser from scratch in a timely manner.)
This is just a hypothetical scenario for now. So I can adjust the way I save my metadata if that would make this type of system easier to implement. I’ve tried setting up similar systems for myself in the past, but I found that I need to keep it simple to maintain up-to-date metadata – otherwise I develop bad habits where I don’t regularly update it, and it becomes not so useful. So I’ve found keeping the metadata within the document text itself, and keeping it simple enough that I can automate it using tools like Typinator and Keyboard Maestro helps me keep in the habit using these metadata fields to their fullest potential.
I found this thread had some useful info but not enough to answer this question - Searching for documents based on Markdown front-matter
).