grandchild

[lawquest]

All the notes I make are at the same level. How do I make a
hierarchical file?

[Dan Graham]

The directory structure below your ntsdata directory provides the
hierarchy. From 'Hierarchical notes' on the website:

The path and file name without the extension provide the hierarchy for
the note. E.g., suppose you have the notes file::

~/.nts/data/parent/child/grandchild.txt

with the following content::

----------- begin grandchild.txt ----------------------
+ note a (tag 1, tag 2)
the body of my first note

+ note b (tag 2, tag 3)
the body of my second note
----------- end grandchild.txt ------------------------

Then when outlining by **path** you would see::

parent
child
grandchild
note a
note b

[lawquest]

I read the ntsdata instructions carefully before sending my post. I
think you presume a level of competence that is not here. Or perhaps
my nts isn't working right. In your example, how do you get /parent/
child? Do you have to do go out of nts, for example to pcmanfm and
create the directory? If I do that, how do I see "parent" or "child"
in nts?

[Dan Graham]

When you use the command Shift Ctrl-S to save a note as a new file,
the file selection dialog should give you the opportunity to create a
new directory in which to place the new file. Alternatively, you could
use your favorite file manager to create whatever directory structure
you like and then create the note files themselves using nts.

Still another alternative would be to use an existing directory
structure. If you have, for example, a folder called '~/Documents/
ClientFiles', you could set that as your data directory, ntsdata, in
~/.nts/rc and then use nts to insert note files in those directories.
If you already have files with the extension '.txt' in these
directories, the next release of nts will allow you to use a
different extension for note files, say '.nts' instead of '.txt'.

Note that nts will not show directories in the tree outline unless
they contain note files. The 'save note as a new file' dialog will,
however, show the all of the directories, whether or not they have
note files, and allow you to add your new note files to them. Once
you've added a note file to a directory, then the entire path to the
file will appear in the tree outline.

[Dan Graham]

John,

I've released version 38. Among other things, both the on-line and
internal documentation have been rewritten and hopefully improved. As
always, I appreciate your feedback when my explanations aren't very
clear.

Thanks,
Dan

On Oct 12, 12:08 pm, lawquest <whitelawcharte...@gmail.com> wrote:

[lawquest]

And I appreciate your continuing efforts to simplify our lives while
assisting us as we attempt to remove some of its inefficiencies.

[lawquest]

I think it would help considerably if, when you get time, you could
show step-by-step examples of how you use nts for note
taking....Taking us from the initial screen, to creating the first
file, then a child file and then a grandchild file, and all the steps
in-between, so we could follow along on our own machines. And then,
using the example files that we create as above, showing how the path
and tag functions organize them. Perhaps if you get time, you could do
this via movie format.

[Dan Graham]

Good idea! I've just posted an introductory movie to the web site. I
hope you find it helpful.

[lawquest]

Thanks for the movie. It is a big help. My movie abruptly stops
during the unicode discussion, but the info before that was very
helpful. I am not sure I understand the theory of nts, or the reasons
it is superior to my current practice of doing txt notes in
subdirectories. But I know that my current system leaves much to be
desired, i.e. my notes traditionally go into a client project file on
my hard drive. In that project subdirectory are many different sub-
folders whose names had meaning to me when I created them. However,
after a few weeks, that meaning is lost in large part and I often
create another sub-folder rather than using the old one. After a few
months, my initial organizational efforts are largely useless and I
end up traversing to the main subdirectory and searching it with grep
or, less often, find, and even less often google desktop (because
google desktop searches my whole hard drive). Of late, I have added
google docs to all this and have been keeping notes there. Google
docs has a very good, subdirectory specific, search function. But too
often all this fails and I get on the court's site and search by file
date. At least the court's online files are organized by date (I used
to mirror the court's file on my hard drive but that took too much
time).

I gather that with nts I have two basic options. I could add
subdirectories to the nts default file, .nts/data and in effect
repopulate it, so that the subfolders under .nts/data more or less
duplicate my existing, client/project based, subdirectories. Or
instead I could navigate to each of my existing subdirectories and
create a nts note file there. Best I can tell, this second option
involves doing the stuff you show at the beginning of the movie (touch
rc, etc) for each subdirectory. If I do this high up in the main
subdirectory, ls -l shows hundreds of files and I get a nts import
error and the nts gui won't come up. If I make my own nts
subdirectory in my existing "notes" subdirectory under each client/
project subdirectory, ls -l only shows 3 files, as in the movie and
the nts gui works.

It seems to me that one advantage to the first option would be ease of
update, in the event you modify nts. I would presumably only have to
do it once. If, instead, I choose the second option and put nts
subfiles in each client/project notes subdirectory, I would have to do
a lot of updating if a new version of nts comes down the pike.

Having said all that, either option is likely to be better than the
way I am currently organizing my note files, so, as I am working
today, I have decided to start by putting nts as a subfile to my
existing notes subfile under each client/project subfile. However, if
you have comments that interrupt this, I can quickly change as I have
learned how to move notes.

[lawquest]

[lawquest]

I should have added that I am using undated tasks in etm (the "g"
function) to help me find existing notes. It shows great promise.

[Dan Graham]

The format of notes and the note file will not change, even if nts is
revised.

You only need ONE rc file. Say you have a directory, "~/Documents/
Clients", with an enormous tree of, say 10,000, sub-directories under
it corresponding to different clients and cases. You just put the path
to Clients in your ~/.nts/rc as the value of ntsdata:

ntsdata = '''~/Documents/Clients'''

nts will then search the entire directory structure under Clients
looking for note files with the extensions corresponding to the values
of ntstxt and ntsenc from your rc file. By default these are ".txt"
and ".enc" but you can have them be anything you want to avoid
conflicts with files you already have.

If your existing directory structure has names that are meaningless,
then you would probably be better advised to create a separate notes
directory structure organized in a sensible way, perhaps by client,
with sub-directories under each client directory for projects, cases
or whatever. You, of course, know better than I what would be useful.
My only advise would be to think long and hard about the best way to
organize this structure and then stick to it.

There are three differences with etm notes. First, you can incorporate
your notes in a hierarchial directory structure and browse them in an
outline. etm notes are essentially organized by date. nts notes are
organized by heirarchy. Secondly, the notes can have multiple lines,
can incorporate simple rst markup and can be printed in formatted html
documents. Thirdly, etm limits notes (and other entries) to a single
keyword. nts, on the other hand, allows you to associate as many tags
as you like with a note. Notes on a case, for example, might have tags
corresponding to the client's name, the court date and anything else
you might like. The advantage of the tag search relative to grep is
that a tag search for a date will only identify notes with the date in
the tag entry. A grep search for the same date might include many
extraneous notes containing the same date in the note body.