Defile provides tools to embed metadata in file names, namely IDs and tags. File names are formatted as follows, with [] indicating optional fields:

[ID--]TITLE[__TAG1_TAG2][.EXT]

The main benefits of this format are:

• An alternative to a directory hierarchy. In many cases, it doesn’t make sense to distinguish tag1/tag2/title from tag2/tag1/title.
• An unchanging ID for links, currently used by the “defile” Org link format.

Some unfortunate downsides are:

• File name lengths are limited, which then limits the length of the ID and tags.
• A long ID or lots of tags make the file name ugly.

The main features Defile provides are:

• Renaming files with special completion (defile-rename-file, defile-dired-do-rename).
• A file for adding descriptions to tags, which are shown when completing a tag (defile-tag-file).
• Renaming a tag, which renames all files with that tag (defile-rename-tags).
• An Org link format “defile” (accessible from org-store-link and org-insert-link).

Defile was largely inspired by Denote. Some major similarities and differences:

• By default, denote and defile share the same ID--TITLE__TAGS.ext format.
• The ID in Denote is a ISO 8601 timestamp. It can be anything in Defile.
• Denote has many features for working with plain-text notes. Defile does not.

If you include denote-directory in your defile-lookup-path, your Denote notes will be included as Defile files. For example, Defile tag completions will include Denote tags.

Using elpaca and elpaca-use-package-mode:

(use-package defile
  :ensure ( defile :type git :host github
	    :repo "nick4f42/defile.el" :depth nil)
  :init
  (with-eval-after-load 'dired
    (add-hook 'dired-mode-hook #'defile-dired-mode))

  :config
  (setopt defile-lookup-path '("~/Documents")))