More robust date/time system

[ognsya]

Would be great to be able to reference partial dates, such as just YEAR or YEAR/MONTH.

Sorting should work on these too (ex: 2020 > 2019/03 > 2019/02/20).

PS: similar request in reddit:

r/remNote - More robust date/time system?

[ognsya]

Bump. Anyone has any idea of how to implement something like this in RemNote currently (in a sane way)?

[UMNiK]

Literally make references to years (as in type in the year rather than using !!), store them under rem named “by year” and apply automatically sort to it?

[ognsya]

Could you elaborate a bit, maybe with an example?

Do you mean that for each Rem I want to date, I should add a tag , like “2020/11”, “2019” or “2017/12/12”?

But then how would RemNote know that these tags are all dates, in order to be able to see them all in the same place?
Would I also need to tag those Rems as “date” (or something like that)?

[UMNiK]

I’ll give you two possibilities.

• Whenever you type in text that contains a year, select that year and make it a reference. Then go into that reference and ctrl+shift+m it to a years rem. Observe.
  
  
  Obviosly, you’d remove the stub tag afterwards.
• If there is no text to reference, you create the rem with the wanted date in advance, then tag the rem with the created date. Observe.
  

Or even combine the two methods, since all you really want are the backlinks, be they from tags or references.

As for months and days, you could again do a bit of legwork. See.

To get full breadcrumbs right click on the reference and click show full name. Sadly, tags only preserve one level up of breadcrumbs.

[hannesfrank]

I have thought about that a while ago as well when I tried to make a calender view (like the Obsidian plugin, or as simple as this https://forum.roamresearch.com/t/how-i-quickly-navigate-in-time/610).

For me the problem is basically that there is no way to create a date, neither by paste nor using the API (Ability to paste references to dates/daily notes).

If we could paste dates then you could just generate the references (and therefore the daily notes) for all dates using 3 lines of code or even just a text editor, like

- December 2020
  - !![2020-12-01]
  - !![2020-12-02]
  - ...

The other way would be to make a plugin/user script which searches for already created dates. It would have to leave holes for not created ones as - again - we have no way to create a daily note.

[ognsya]

Thanks for that. I’m still a bit confused though…

I want the Rems to continue existing where they are. But also to be able to see them within a custom “Timeline” document.

For example, let’s say my knowledge base is this:

Document A
	Item A1
	Item A2
Document B
	Item B1
		Subitem B1a
		Subitem B1b
	Item B2
	Item B3

I’d like to be able to add dates to some of the Rems, for example:

Document A
	Item A1			(2020/11)
	Item A2
Document B
	Item B1
		Subitem B1a	(2020/11/09)
		Subitem B1b	(1970)
	Item B2			(2001/09/21)
	Item B3			(2001/09/22)

Then, I’d like to be able to create a Timeline document where all those Rems are listed by date, maybe like this:

**1970**
DocumentB/Item B1/Subitem B1b	(1970)

**2001**
DocumentB/Item B2				(2001/09/21)
DocumentB/Item B3				(2001/09/22)

**2020**
Document A/Item A1				(2020/11)
Document B/Item B1/Subitem B1a	(2020/11/09)

The way I’d think to do this would be to have the Timeline document be a series of Search portals, but I couldn’t manage to make that work… (I couldn’t make the search term be limited to the tag…)
Does any of this make sense?

[UMNiK]

Sadly, to the day this is impossible (unless you adopt a funky dating convention like days elapsed from some time), but to the year it is quite easy if you don’t mind opening the tag search portals. Here it is.

Do note that those search portals a bit finicky: you have to zoom into the year rem (e.g. 1953) and open the search portal from there, then back out and expand it in the zoomed out view.

[hannesfrank]

Ah, another reason to get Ability to create all content via API [and RemNote flavored markdown] done : markup to paste search portals (and later queries).

[ognsya]

And/or for Table/Spreadsheet support!

That way I could just add dates as a custom slot.
And use that as first column. Then just sort by that!
(If that makes sense?)

[nech]

Thank you very much for a great program. Remnote is a wonder !
Remnote is very well adapted for studying medicine, biology and various exact sciences. However, for the study of history and other humanities disciplines, where most of the information is related to dates, there is a lack of some functionality related to the implementation of such a data type as a date.

My suggestions for improvement this data type:

• create the ability to enter the date B.C. or A. D. For example
  Cleopatra’s birth::51 B.C.

• search for documents by dates of historical events. The design of the search may be the following:
  #wars and (!!1800 between !!1850) - all wars (by tag wars) that took place from 1800 to 1850 will be displayed.

Finally, it would be great if developers could realize a plugin similar to** Timeline View * * in Tinderbox: https://eastgate.com/Tinderbox/updates/Tinderbox56.html .

[Gabriela.AD]

Can something like this work for you, if you are history majors? Stuff’s collapsable, so you can have a time-line view (or just have a page that renders your tagged years?). Smush location in the concept Rem instead.

I learned to always place dates/years at the very beginning of the page when studying history - The easiest place to see them and not lose them.(if your notebook comes pre lined, it goes in the pre-line section) and keep stuff to one line, maybe two, only putting in consequences indented (the cause wasn’t put down, teacher would make us active recall and find the cause for the war and deduce who won and why on the spot). So notes would look actually like this:

You can also smush the consequences into the same line, usually, you won’t care for individual descriptors with them.
Obviously, you can tag & refference things with war and battle/skirmish, countries that partook, etc. Didn’t fiddle with it for this fake example. You can still add the month & day for the years that need it: 31 May 1950::

Doesn’t help improve the date system, this it is only a workaround for history people.

[nech]

Gabriela.AD, many thanks for the idea of how to organize stuff. But I very much expect that in the near future, the developers of RemNote will implement an improved date/time format and create the ability to search for events between two dates.

[Gabriel_Montagne_Las]

It’d be nice to have smarter dates – at least recurrent, a date without a year, for example, for a birthday, or, as suggested elsewhere, months without day, etc.

You could go all crazy “remind” like, and that’d be super useful – might bring people from other calendar solutions,

6 January Dianne’s Birthday
REM 1 MSG First of every month.
REM 31 MSG 31st of every month that has 31 days.
REM 1991 MSG Every day in 1991
REM Sat MSG Every Saturday
REM Mon 1 -7 MSG Last Monday of every month.

… .and so on and so forth.

https://man.archlinux.org/man/remind.1#REMINDER_FILES