A ramble about various note-taking applications

Posted by Amontillado
Jun 25, 2023 at 11:25 PM

Today I learned a new Devonthink trick. You can put commands in URLs. Search is my favorite.

For instance, I downloaded all of our State statutes (I didn’t break any that I know of). In six months the new version will come out.

It’s about 5,000 files and I don’t want to assume the next release will have the same file name so wikilinks may not survive refreshing the data.

Instead of conventional linking between a note and the supporting file, I can do a Markdown link like this:

[Unemployment](x-devonthink://search?query=content:%22TEXAS%20UNEMPLOYMENT%20COMPENSATION%20ACT%22%20AND%20209.001)

In Devonthink terms, it’s like a link being a smart group, pretty much.

By default it searches in all open databases. You can add %20scope:DatabaseName at the end of the query string to select a particular database, and it works from applications supporting the x-devonthink URLs.

Happy, happy, happy.

I can see a lot of use for this.