Fsnotes: Filter to find unlinked (orphaned) notes?

[peanutputter]

Hi Newbie here,

Supporter of both Mac and iOS app due to active development. Kudos and keep up the great work.

I am a big fan of the Zettelkasten method which includes highly hyperlinked notes to other notes. Question: is there any way, filter to find notes that are NOT linked to other notes? In other words, orphan notes?

Thanks in advance,
Tom

[gingerbeardman]

It can be done easily for tags, because FSN uses the standard MacOS tags so you can use Finder to do a complex logical search on them.

For hyperlinks, you should be able to do a "search all" in a good text editor (Sublime?) on your notes folder so that you can see which files don't contain ]( - part of a markdown hyperlink.

Let us know how you get on.

I'd not heard of Zettelkasten, very cool, thanks!

[jeff-h]

Your "search all" suggestion will only find notes that don't link out to others. I think the original issue is how to find notes that no other note links to, and I can't think of any way to achieve that without specifically writing code to do so.

The logic would go something like this, I guess;

1. go through every note and record every link found
2. go through every note and see if a link to it is found in the aggregate collection made in step 1
3. show any notes which do not have a link

Whilst I'm dubious that this is within scope for FSNotes, unfortunately I can't think how you could achieve it any other way :( @gingerbeardman any other ideas? :)

[gingerbeardman]

Ah yes, misunderstanding from me.

In that case I would approach it from the shell:

1. grep '](' * | cut -d'/' -f 4 | sed -E -e 's/\)/.md/g' -e 's/%20/ /g' | sort > linked.txt
   
   
   
   • grep (list) all notes containing Markdown links
   
   
   • cut (extract) the linked filename
   
   
   • correct format of filename (add .md ending, decode spaces)
   
   
2. ls -R1 *.md | sort > all.txt
3. list all notes
4. recursive subfolder search
5. one per line
6. sorted
7. diff linked.txt all.txt
8. show files from all.txt that are not in linked.txt

🤘😎

[jeff-h]

😮