Disambiguation Page of All Notes

[spaceclottey]

This is a proposal for a feature that creates a page of all your markdown notes, so that people navigating your Foam site will be able to locate pages that would be otherwise orphaned.

[riccardoferretti]

do I understand correctly that this is an index page for all your notes?

[rajlego]

Yes, that's what we have in mind. It's difficult to find a lot of notes (for browsers of our site) since many are orphans (since wiki is still relatively new) and others might be hidden more deeply.

[MCluck90]

I'd like to make a request maybe for a v2 of this feature: allow the user to specify some sort of filter. In my case, I would find value in indexing most of my notes but indexing all of my daily notes would just create a lot of noise.

[rajlego]

Small extra request for a maybe v3...could you sort by 'weight'? Put things with most links to/from at the top and descend?
I have a burning hatred of sites like Paul Graham's which have amazing content but force me to go through them in random, arbitrary inefficient order

[Koleok]

Pretty easy to just write a script for this and run it prepush or something, I initially did just that when I started my repo, but found that it rendered the graph much less useful with hundreds of useless edges that don't represent conceptual connections. In order for a master index to be useful it'd be nice to be able to tell the graph to ignore specific files, in a foam config file or something.

[Koleok]

I might take a crack at this actually, nice easy entry issue 👌

[daniel-vera-g]

I recently migrated my "regular" notes to foam and created "local" index files that link to related concepts. I used a simple shell script.

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For this use case, I would used a simple find command that searches all local markdown files and inserts them in the index file with the foam link-syntax.

• I use fd:

fd -e md -E '*/journal/*' -x echo '- [['{/.}']]' > index.md

• But you can also achieve same results with find(I don't use it regulary...maybe there's a simpler option):

find  ./ -name '*.md' -not -path '*/journal/*' -exec basename {} .md \; | while read filename;do echo '- [['$filename']]' >> index.md;done

This essentially allows to:

1. Create an index page of all your foam notes
2. Use any kind of filter(Filename patterns, Content RegEx patterns,...)
3. Ignore specific files/folders after a pattern,...

You could expand this and sort for the amount of foam links in it(Weight). But this was not in my scope 😄

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Maybe it helps someone in the meantime.

[cliffordfajardo]

I tend to fiddle around with other PKM just to learn from their user interfaces and Reflect.app has a "All notes" tab which lists all your notes in a list like so:

Note: I don't use the app, so I cannot give detailed description about it; I'm currently using Foam and sometimes use Obsidian

Creating a custom UI for this type of view is possible; I haven't written a VSCode extension in about 2 years (I've published a few tho)
I started a discussion here about the new VSCode APIs/utility libraries that Microsoft & Github have been collaborating on here and how they might be relevant to Foam:

• 💡 Road to Richer UI components in Foam VS Code extension? #951