Link to previous chronological note

[bhargavkulk]

I’m thinking about adding a feature for my notes — I want to be able to link to the previous note that shares the same keywords. Are there any functions that could make that easier to do?

[lmq-10]

In Denote, the file identifier is also the date of creation. This means you can generate a list of your notes and then sort by identifier, and that will be the same as sorting by date. A combination of denote-directory-files and denote-sort-files will do the trick.

So, this returns the last note with the keyword emacs, not including current one.

;; (car (last ...)) gets the last element of a list
(car (last
      (denote-sort-files
       (denote-directory-files "_emacs" :omit-current)
       'identifier)))

This works even if you changed the order of components and/or use multiple directories, but not if you changed default identifier format.

You said you want to link to a previous note that shares the same keywords as current one. You can extract the keywords for current note with:

(denote-extract-keywords-from-path buffer-file-name)

You can create a link with the following code (you need to fill FILE with the actual file you want to link to).

(denote-link FILE (denote-filetype-heuristics buffer-file-name) (denote-get-link-description FILE))

If you want to craft the function yourself, this is enough to do so; you just need a little bit of Elisp to glue it together. Otherwise, feel free to ask and we'll create something for you!

[bhargavkulk]

It turns out just using denote-sequence is what I needed. Thanks for the help anyways!