Feature request: Show date infront of note name

ArSn · 2020-12-17T22:32:56.175Z

Hi,

yes, I searched github and the #features category if somebody already opened a feature request like this - I did not find any and I hope I did not just miss it.

So for a couple of weeks now I have been using Joplin quite continiously and I plan on continuing that. One part of it is that I use it for kind of a "daily journal" where I write down what I did that day so I can look it up later on.

I create one note each day, and have them sorted descending by creation date, which all already works fine.

Now the request: What I would like to be able to do is to show the date of the note creation just before the name of the note in the notes list. This way it would be much easier for me to have an overview of which note was from what day.

And of course: I could just prepend the date to all my notes by hand, but hey - software is there to save us work

Acceptance criteria would be (thats what I wish for):

Show date infront of note name in the notes list
Date format according to settings (the settings option already exists)

Possible extended criteria (thats what other people might like too):

Have it configurable wheter date of creation or date of update of the note is used
Add some sort of "Choose your own syntax", enabling users to only show date parts that they want, like a user could configure to show "%M-%D --" and it would result in having the dates shown in that format of where %M and %D are placeholders for month and day. This is however a pretty big advancement of the original idea here and could be well put into a different feature / next iteration of this one

Being a developer myself I would love to have this as a first project to contribute to joplin and build it myself. The contributing guidelines just say I should ask here first if that would be a welcomed feature, which is what I am doing hereby.

So, what do you guys think? Should I get on it?

Daeraxa · 2020-12-17T23:33:45.406Z

I would love to see it, I seem to recall there is something similar on Evernote where the notes panel is shown (at least on the web version) as a title, first few lines of the note and the (creation?) date. Personally I can do without the summary but the date and tags were really useful for me and is something I feel would be good to have.

laurent · 2020-12-18T00:44:08.545Z

What we need is something like this: Show metadata in note list A pull request would be welcome but I think that’s a lot of work for a first feature.

ArSn · 2020-12-18T17:29:43.866Z

Thanks for the input. Yes it might be a bit much to do all at once, but I'll try and make multiple pull requests as you suggested in the linked thread and just see how far I can get. I'll be sure to say so once I start the work on it in the other thread, as was requested there.

laurent · 2020-12-18T17:31:56.286Z

It would be useful to describe into details what you are going to implement for the first step, simply in terms of user functionalities. These spec often are as valuable than the code, as they help define what needs to be done, what tests to write, how to review the pull request, etc.

ArSn · 2020-12-21T20:39:49.600Z

That makes perfect sense laurent.

So for a start I would:

Change the note list to have column headers
When column header is rightclicked, optionally select/deselect: Created (Date and Time together), Updated (Date and Timetogether) and Title in the context menu
This will need a guard to not be able to remove the last column that is displayed, as the header might vanish otherwise which would not make any sense and the user could not get back their columns
Try and size the columns in a somewhat reasonable manner so the info can actually show (this feels like I might run a bit into trouble here, but let's see)

About tests: I am not sure what Joplins approach to testing is since I still have to dig through the contributing guidelines. However, I would strive to automatically test as much of the functionality as possible.

I'll start digging into it now.

Btw.: Should I also create an issue on GitHub with acceptance criteria or something, or should the PR just reference this discourse thread?

ArSn · 2020-12-25T15:53:20.308Z

Hi again,

@laurent As if you knew what you were talking about you are absolutely right that this turned out to be a lot of work

Unfortunately, due to some unforeseen circumstances in my personal life, I will not be able to finish this grid-like feature because of time management issues (I'll also say so in the other thread).

I could potentially make a very simplistic version if it where you would just enable a prefix in the settings and can maybe select whether it should be creation or update date.

Would a pull request for some very basic and simple version of this still be welcome or would you rather not have the feature at all then?

laurent · 2020-12-25T16:10:52.876Z

No worries, and in that case indeed I prefer no to have the feature at all. It would be a good idea for a plugin though once what's needed to customise the note list is in place.

ArSn · 2020-12-26T01:01:07.600Z

Sounds reasonable! Maybe I can build that then once the Plugin API is evolved enough

CalebJohn · 2020-12-26T05:33:54.363Z

If you don't mind me asking, what would the plugin API need to be evolved enough for this feature? It seems that this will be fairly easy using the plugin api and creating a custom note list.

dlongm01 · 2021-03-04T12:02:18.901Z

Agreed. Showing the date of a post is a very useful feature.