I should clarify. What I mean is, having read your blog post (and once briefly having tried out Dendron), I'm really interested by your hierarchical naming system, eg lang.python.operator.md etc - but I'm curious to imagine how it might apply to other concepts beside programming languages.

Hi Robert! It might be easier to give examples if you shared what you're interested in taking notes about. I tend to name my notes based less on "is this truly a hierarchical relationship" and more on "how do I want to associate these notes? how do I want them to fold in the side bar?" I'm not a birder, but I imagine someone into birdwatching might have notes like

raptor.owl.barn-owl

,

raptor.owl.burrowing-owl

,

raptor.falcon.kestrel

,

raptor.falcon.peregrine-falcon

, and

wading.plover.snowy-plover

…  …or maybe they'd make them more about locations where they might see each type of bird, like

shore.plover.snowy-plover

,

hiking.falcon.kestrel

, and

hiking.owl.burrowing-owl

.

Yeah... philosophy.stoicism.control.md / philosophy.stoicism.concepts/control.md (Dichotomy Of Control)

The feature called Refactor Hierarchy makes bulk renaming far faster than doing it manually: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/9zwkp44wnlaa8p8dpt4w8tq/ Dendron definitely is designed to help you reorganize notes as topics / structures emerge organically. Personally, when it's just three or four notes, I tend to rename them manually, since that lets me "try on" the new structure to see if it makes sense as I type it, or if I should make the "levels"/"nodes" of the hierarchy shorter / more memorable / etc. But once it gets to be more than a handful of notes, the Refactor Hierarchy command makes this process much more automatic. I'm pretty good at typing, but computers will always be better at this kinda thing!

Thanks. Sounds good. But I'd finally have to learn regular expressions?

Oh, that guide is written ambiguously, isn't it? I think what is intended is that this feature applies regular expressions, and you can enter them yourself if you want. But you don't have to enter terms as regular expressions. The refactor hierarchy interface prompts you for input, and this can be as simple as a new word. It's been a while since I used it, but I might take a few screenshots later this afternoon if that'll explain it better.

Ah, thanks.

The problem Refactor Hierarchy is that you can not select multiple notes then apply the refactoring command. You have to repeat the steps multiple time 😅

The command lets you select multiple notes below a certain "level" in a hierarchy, but you're right that you would have to run the command multiple times if you wanted to combine notes from multiple hierarchies.

Thanks!

Sure! I downloaded Dendron's handbook from https://github.com/dendronhq/handbook so that I wouldn't have to come up with my own examples. Maybe you'd also want to use it as a playground to test this sort of batch editing, without worrying about messing up your own files?

Could I actually ask about the wikilinks in images 2 and 3? [[here|user.kevin.journal.2021.05.31]] ... I frankly only just learned about that piped formulation (custom anchor text, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Piped_link) yesterday, via the Obsidian community ... but I thought the order was [[actual.file.name|click here]] ... don't I see this the other way around in your images?

Oh, interesting! I actually haven't used piped links, since I haven't started publishing my own notes yet. Dendron's syntax does put the legible text in front of the file name, and the Wikipedia example has the file name first and the legible text after. Here's a preview of that note, and you can see what link text is rendered. Maybe one of the developers knows the backstory for Dendron's version of this syntax?

Yesterday, after reading about Dendron's approach to hierarchical file-naming, which seemed appealing, I thought "how would this work in Obsidian, or Notion?" By default, they use human-type names as filenames. Using parent.child.subchild.md for filenames would not be neat at all if surfaced in an actual note, eg. "Of all the presidents [[politics.us.presidents.george-washington]] was certainly the best", or, say, "Programming languages like [[coding.lang.python]] are cool", that would surely look messy to readers... But someone pointed out that you could use piped links to use a custom anchor text - eg" "George Washington and "Python". I'm wondering if Dendron has an out-of-the-box way in which hierarchical note filenames get transformed into a corresponding meaningful human title in the front, or if this is tackled manually, by the author using piped links.

That's a good question. Just from looking at my own notes, it seems like Dendron will use the last "chunk" of a note's name — just George Washington or Python, from your examples. Here's an example from one of my own notes. You can see that the preview pane on the right removes the

journal.2022.

part of the file name from each of the links.

Hmm. Thanks. Hah. These are questions of mine at this stage because I haven't rolled my sleeves up much on Dendron yet. I'm not a developer so am not in VS Code as much as I wish I was, and I'm often on my iPad so cross-platform would be tricky.

They're all really prudent questions! I'm not really a developer either, but I used to use Atom for plaintext notes before switching to VS Code so I could use Dendron. It took me a while to get used to using code editors instead of other apps like NVAlt or FoldingText, but now I really appreciate how much VS Code lets you customize things like themes or extra plug-ins like https://github.com/mihaiconstantin/bujo For whatever it's worth, I use 1Writer on my iPhone / iPad pretty frequently for editing notes away from my laptop. It's the app that handles [[wikilinks]] the best on iOS, from what I've seen. https://1writerapp.com/