Dendron

Tips and Tricks

Manually updating created and updated front matter

The created and updated in the front matter are Unix epoch timestamps. For the most part it doesn't matter, and you are unlikely to pay attention to them since they are autopopulated for you.

But I was moving some of my old notes and I wanted to ensure they are timestamped correctly using their original time of creation.Kevin pointed me to this site where I could get the epoch timestamp for older dates.

One tiny inconvenience with above site is that the timestamp is only 10 digit - while Dendron uses 13 digit timestamp that includes milliseconds too. So I add 3 extra zeros at the end.
I don't care about millisecond precision, so it is OK πŸ˜†

I had to update the updated field outside VSCodium using external editor, since Dendron plugin kept updating it with current timestamp πŸ˜„

When creating the note entirely outside VSCode/ium, one can use CurrentMillis

Turns out CurrentMillis also lets you convert older dates - It does automatically what I did manually, add extra 3 zeros at the end πŸ˜†

Create note from the terminal

I have had a problem where whenever I run VSCodium (along with Firefox) my Linux machine becomes unresposive. While I am looking at multiple options to resolve this, one thing I decided to use was to Edit the markdown files elsewhere like in Emacs (or nvim) But Dendron gives a bunch of nice features that I could not do outside VSCodium (Or so I thought)
One of them was to create a daily journal note. Turns out I can do that from the terminal using :

dendron note write --fname "daily.journal.2023.04.30"

Couple of things to remember though :

  • dendron-cli needs to be globally installed via -g option
  • Don't use .md at the end. Else the file with two .md gets created. Like daily.journal.2021.08.31.md.md
  • Optionally, you can specify --vault "vaultName" --body "this is a body"

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