Introducing filesystem hierarchy support in Ka
Blog post on 2020-10-18
I had new requirement for Ka when working with my private notebook (which has plenty of daily notes): archive old notes whilst still being able to access and link to them.
My initial idea was a complicated one: write a specialized archive plugin. However, because I now strongly believe that software should be simple with a simple but functional UX,1 I decided to take a more general approach: if ka supported reading notes from the whole directory tree, then I can move note files to any sub-directory, and write a small plugin that will treat any pre-defined directory as containing archived notes (the UI can then hide these notes by default from sidebar listing).
Interlude
A trick I used here to overcome the tendency to design complex solutions by habit is to Think long-term when designing plugins. What would it look like to archive notes, whilst also marking their temporal position (say, spanning 3 years)?
Such a general solution to this problem also enables other interesting use cases. For example, I can now put notes under different “buckets” – for eg., work related notes can be put under the ./Work directory. Consequently, there is now an opportunity to improve the sidebar UI so as to present a tree view for navigating notes.
Of course, our notebook is still interlinked Zettelkasten-style. Notes from any directory can link to notes from any other directory. To this end, linking to ./Foo/Bar/SomeNote.md, for example, is done via [[SomeNote]]–i.e; a note is identified by its filename alone, regardless of its position in the directory hierarchy. This allows one to freely move notes around.
Staying simple from the start, is a core tenet of the Ka project. See also: Markdown notes can be extended without compromising simplicity.
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