Thanks again. I’m mainly using Find Incoming Wikilinks and a Find Incoming Direct Links scripts. I’ve now set up 2 Keyboard Maestro macros to automatically:
Move the current window to the left half of the screen.
Create a new window and move it to the right half of the screen.
Bring the previous window to the foreground again.
I put together a book on using DEVONthink that I’m releasing soon and included some of this thread. I wanted to send a thanks to you, but your profile is private. Could you send me a DM?
@Kourosh you re using the script provided by @pete31 in your book in the chapter Finding Return Links - AppleScripts and Smart Rules.
In that section you point out that the current script for search for finding incoming WikiLinks does not yet cover aliases, and to resolve this by manually typing the alias as search.
You can also directly add these to the search query. Do note that this assumes that all aliases are separated by semicolons only (as required in the DT3 manual).
-- Find incoming links for a Markdown record via Wikilinks
-- Make sure you have two viewer windows open (with only one you'll loose the selection of the Markdown record)
tell application id "DNtp"
try
set windowClass to class of window 1
if {viewer window, search window} contains windowClass then
set currentRecord_s to selection of window 1
else if windowClass = document window then
set currentRecord_s to content record of window 1 as list
end if
if (count of currentRecord_s) = 0 then
display notification "Please select a record"
return
end if
if (count of viewer windows) < 2 then
display notification "Please open a second viewer window"
return
end if
set theRecord to item 1 of currentRecord_s
if type of theRecord = markdown then
set theName to name of theRecord
set theAliases to aliases of theRecord
-- start Insert " | " between every alias
-- ensure double quote around each alias (for aliases of separate words)
-- Assumption: each alias is separated by semicolons
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ";"
set theTextItems to every text item of theAliases
set theAliasesQuery to ""
repeat with textItem in theTextItems
set theAliasesQuery to theAliasesQuery & "|" & "\"" & textItem & "\""
end repeat
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
-- end Insert
-- added theAliasesQuery to extend the search
tell viewer window 2
set search query to "text:" & theName & theAliasesQuery & space & "kind:markdown"
set theResults to search results
end tell
if theResults = {} then
display notification "No links found"
return
end if
-- after getting the results it's possible to do other stuff, e.g. adding the reference URL of every record in the results as custom meta data of the record you started from
else
display notification "Please select a Markdown record"
return
end if
on error error_message number error_number
if the error_number is not -128 then display alert "DEVONthink" message error_message as warning
end try
end tell
I think Roam Research has this function and this’s the most wonderful feature for that app.
Displaying the network of connection among those notes in DEVONthink is very useful and important for researchers and students, because if one know better on the topology of the notes, S/he would understand well on those information, moreover, based on the structure of the connection between notes, it’s beneficial to carry forward the frontier of knowledge.
IMHO native support for showing backlinks would be a powerful upgrade to DEVONthink’s current WikiLink functionality as well as DT’s ability to help users find connections across different documents and ideas. I think most WikiLink users will welcome this feature.
To take this idea a bit further, it would also be nice to show a “local node graph” centered around the selected document, e.g. all the documents that are connected to the current document, and all the documents that are connected to those. I imagine such a local graph could have great potential to provide users insight on the current document. It’s like a graphical approach to the existing See Also & Classify functionality, but for explicit WikiLinks created by the user instead of content relevance calculated by the AI.
Recently there seems to be a surge of note taking apps that take the connections between notes seriously such as Roam Research and Obsidian, and the latter just released a Local Graph feature. I personally would be thrilled to see DEVONthink treat WikiLinks as a first class citizen, and automatic backlinks should be a very solid starting point
Edit: here’s Obsidian’s Local Graph functionality in action.
I haven’t purchased DEVONagent (yet) so I looked it up. I think that is exactly what I was thinking about, good to know that DEVONagent already lets users visualize the connections. Hopefully DT will have a similar feature.
Thanks @Kourosh for these macros. Besides the new snag (but with possible positive developments coming @cgrunenberg) in the system with respect to using the “Find incoming item links” script that @pete31 had generously provided to all (see Search for x-devonthink-item link not working), I have the curious problem on my end that when I run your macro for incoming wikilinks the script trips up at setting the record and sends me a notification “Please select a record” but when I run the same script manually from the menu it works perfectly. Any ideas…?
Thanks for the reply. Sorry for the delay. I went to try your suggestion and realized something else in the process. The apple script file for that (Find Incoming WikiLinks for MD.scpt) included with your book is the earlier version that doesn’t include aliases. As you mention the earlier version and an updated one on p. 257, it would seem that you had intended that script to be the updated one including aliases (right?). So I copied the script from your macro (07. Find Incoming WikiLinks), which does include the aliases and copied and pasted to create a new apple script. Then I finally was able to try your suggestion. But I got the same response error, “Please select a record”. So I copied the script above in this thread edited by @sander2 and created a new apple script file with that and again it works. Well, I guess I will just avoid this macro and run this script manually, as I don’t know enough to figure out the problem.
Along these same lines…the scripts/macros included in your book. More feedback. I have found the reverse situation with regard to the scripts/macros for @Bernardo_V’s Adding incoming back links (Return links/Back links). Both of the macros you set up to run that script 03 (04). Add Back Links to Note - With (or Without) Options work perfectly. But this time the stand alone apple script included in the book returns this for me:
So I copied and pasted the latest version (version of script A.2) (Return links/Back links) into a newly created apple script and ran that as a stand alone and it worked fine.
@kmliebo77 Thanks for letting me know about the discrepancy - I certainly must have updated one and not the other. I’ll add it to a list for an update. I’m sorry you’re having troubles with the scripts - I’ll keep my eye out for the “please select a record” issue and hopefully come up with something.
+1 for the local graph feature. DTP is already offering all the informal semantic relationships – the formal (back-)links would turn it into the most serious Zettelkasten solution out there.
In case you’re trying to run the script I posted in this thread you’ll find that it doesn’t work in DEVONthink 3.6. That’s due to DEVONthink’s new handling of “invalide arguments”.
After the release of DEVONthink 3 I decided to continue to use “search window” in scripts so that DEVONthink 2 users could use them in, well, search windows. With version 3.6 that’s not possible anymore.
If you want to use the script you’ll have to replace this voluminous block …
set windowClass to class of window 1
if {viewer window, search window} contains windowClass then
set currentRecord_s to selection of window 1
else if windowClass = document window then
set currentRecord_s to content record of window 1 as list
end if
… with this neat line …
set currentRecord_s to selected records
… which does what the six lines have done. Wow, that’s great!
Does anyone know if this functionality will be added soon to DevonThink? I don’t really want to use Obsidian and if DT added a built-in functionality to see what notes are linked to a specific link — pretty much a more complete back linking structure — that would be great.
INCOMING AND OUTGOING ITEM LINKS Incoming and outgoing links are item links DEVONthink has detected. The two types of links function as sides of one operation. If you create an item link to an image, the file will have an outgoing link detected. The image you have linked to will have an incoming link detected since the file has a link pointing to it.
Documents with incoming or outgoing links will have a special property icon displayed to the right of the filename in the item list. See also p. 214ff . You can display a sortable Incoming Item Links and Outgoing Item Links column in the headers of the item list in List view. There also are incoming and outgoing item link criteria usable in toolbar searches, smart groups, smart rules, and AppleScript.
VIEWING LINKS
See the Document > Links section of the Inspectors chapter for information on viewing the links of a document.