Take advantage of alphanumeric sorting for file names

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  • 27d ago

Instead of The Four Loves - Friendship.md, prefer The Four Loves - Chapter 4 - Friendship.md, so that your notes are implicitly sorted by chapter.

Especially when chapters/sections/parts are not originally enumerated:

  • Instead of: MCU's Spider-Man: No Way Home
  • Prefer: MCU's Spider-Man - 3 - No Way Home

Almost every place (filesystem, Obsidian file explorer, dataview queries) will list alphanumerically by default, so you get sorting implicitly:

  • MCU's Spider-Man - 1 - Homecoming
  • MCU's Spider-Man - 2 - Far From Home
  • MCU's Spider-Man - 3 - No Way Home

You may not want to Namespace your note title segments, and delimit with hyphens, so something like MCU's Spider-Man 3 No Way Home is still alphanumerically intact after MCU's Spider-Man 2 Far From Home. It makes for shorter titles, but just make sure you don’t run into a situation like tracking sequel trilogy separately where you’d want something like MCU's Spider-Man 2 - 1 - Brand New Day.

Shortcode + Enumeration

The big cost of alphanumeric filenames, is the long useless prefix. Well, perfect for computers, unreadable for humans. The semantically meaningful title comes after the long prefix.

To remedy this, you should condense your note titles, especially when you have a bunch of enumerated notes.

Too longShortcode
Standup Notes - 2001-01-04SU-20010104 (or SU-2001-01-04)
Ticket 1432 - WhatT1432
The Greatest Showman Series - 04 - The Other Side - AnalysisTGSS - 04 - The Other Side – Analysis

I’ve actually done this with a private note series called “Saturday Morning Sessions” to notetake a season of zoom calls that regularly occurred on Saturday mornings. I coded them “SMS 01” all the way through to “SMS 16”. Some sessions were merged together like “SMS 05+06” and others split like “SMS 09a” and “SMS 09b”, which still sorted alphanumerically as desired.

Temporal notes

Use a date format that adffords implicit order.

  • Prefer YYYY-MM-DD over YYYY-DD-MM format (srsly pounds and miles aside, what is this)
  • Use digits instead of text labels (prefer 01 instead of January, since e.g. January should not come after April)

The Zettelkasten notetaking paradigm already implements this, with every note prefixed with a datetime stamp (datetimestamp? date-timestamp? i dunno)

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