Using denote for meetings - reverse order

[tkr911]

Hello Prot + Denote team,

I like the Denote package and specifically would like to use Denote to capture meeting notes.
Prot has written an article on this.

Could I request some help with the following questions:
a) The new meeting headings are added to the end of the list - is there a way to have the meeting inserted in reverse chronological order ? (I used Gemini to try to write this but was unable to reliably locate the end of the front-matter)

b) Is there a way to use the org-capture systems to insert these meetings ? Org capture has a way to specify that new entries are posted to the top of the file, but I was unsuccessful in making this happen)

c) Are there examples on how to search the meeting contents for some text and return just the heading(s) that contain the text ?

Thanks,
T

[tkr911]

I muddled around and came up with the following code (with Gemini's help) which seems to work... I am able to use org-capture to create a new entry at the end of the meetings file - but still don't know how to do a reverse chrono order. using prepend: t did not work..

(add-to-list 'org-capture-templates
'("m" "Meeting with Colleague (Prot's Workflow)" plain
;; 1. Use a function to find and prepare the target file
(function
(lambda ()
(let ((file (my-denote-colleagues-get-file (my-denote-colleagues-prompt))))
(set-buffer (find-file-noselect file))
(goto-char (point-max)))))
;; 2. The content template (Prot uses a timestamped heading)
"* [%<%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M>]\n\n%?"
:empty-lines 1
:jump-to-captured t
:kill-buffer nil))

[protesilaos]

Hello Prot + Denote team,

Hello there!

I like the Denote package and specifically would like to use Denote to capture meeting notes. Prot has written an article on this.

Could I request some help with the following questions: a) The new meeting headings are added to the end of the list - is there a way to have the meeting inserted in reverse chronological order ? (I used Gemini to try to write this but was unable to reliably locate the end of the front-matter)

What I have used before to find the end of the front matter is this approach:

(progn
  ;; Start from the beginning of the buffer
  (goto-char (point-min))
  ;; Find the first line that is empty and move there
  (re-search-forward "^$" nil t))

It is not perfect, as the user may have front matter that includes empty lines, but this is something that generally works. Users who have a custom front matter can, for example, search for the last known string in that front matter and then move one line down. Because this depends on the specifics of a user's setup, it must be handled on a case-by-case basis.

b) Is there a way to use the org-capture systems to insert these meetings ? Org capture has a way to specify that new entries are posted to the top of the file, but I was unsuccessful in making this happen)

Since you already have something there, maybe this is cover now? Otherwise I am happy to write some code for you.

c) Are there examples on how to search the meeting contents for some text and return just the heading(s) that contain the text ?

My general approach is to rely on generic tools. For example, you can use any grep related command to search for ^\\*+ . This means that you are targetting one or more asterisks starting from the beginning of a line, followed by a space.

We have the denote-grep command if you need a way to get to the Denote files more quickly. It can do filtering as well.

An alternative is to use denote-dired to get a listing of the files you want to narrow to, mark all or some of them, and then do M-x dired-do-find-regexp. Then search for what you want.

[tkr911]

Thanks for that tip prot. I ended up with this function which does the job for me.

(setq org-capture-templates
'(("p" "Note" plain
(file+function (lambda () (my-denote-colleagues-get-file (my-denote-colleagues-prompt)))
(lambda ()
(goto-char (point-min))
(if (re-search-forward "^$" nil t)
(forward-line 1)
(goto-char (point-max)))))
"* [%<%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M>]\n\n%?"

:empty-lines 1
:immediate-finish t
:jump-to-captured t
)))

re: searching meeting contents
I could use the method that you suggest (denote-grep or denote-dired) - I was just curious whether I could use the functionality provided by denote org d blocks to work with this meeting template style....

[TomoeMami]

Maybe you can checkout this package to capture with a reverse-datetree: https://github.com/akirak/org-reverse-datetree