Thoughts about filing (moving) notes to containers

Tinderbox Tasks
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I am using Tinderbox for project management and wind up with lots of incoming notes that I want to place in various existing containers. I have experimented with various ways to do this quickly. I want a way to move a note without having to open the corresponding container and copy and paste. Since the target containers are large in number and vary over time, I want to avoid hardcoding stamps to do this (for example).

I wanted to share my current approach and a bit of my thinking behind it in case it is of use (and also in hopes of some feedback).

First, this can be done by changing the value of the Container attribute, but that doesn’t seem to work well for me because if I type the wrong thing, the note is gone before I realize it. It works, but too fast. Also, the drop down list includes all potential containers rather than the subset that I am interested in here.

So, instead, I have set up a user-defined attribute called Target. I set this to be the path of the container and then have a stamp that sets $Container = $Target to effectuate the move.

I also have an agent that adds a right-arrow badge to any note whose $Target is not empty and does not match $Container (and removes the badge when the condition is no longer true). This gives me a visual indicator of whether I have notes to move in map view. My stamp uses an if to only make the move if there is a non-null value for $Target so I can select a number of notes without worrying about precision and the ones that need to move, move.

Finally, I wanted a way to kind of pre-populate the drop down list for $Target with likely values. It turns out that these containers all have a note of a particular kind inside them, and that this kind of note doesn’t need to be moved. So I added an edict to the prototype of that note to set $Target = $Container which means as I add containers of this kind and include this standard note in them, the drop down list updates.

Just starting to use this approach but I am finding it is working well so far and seems to reduce the overhead of organizing my notes into these containers.

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Very clever. Thank you for sharing this.

Just to mention, for completeness, this can be undone with Edit > Undo or ⌘z, of course. But, if Container is misspelled, then after Undo one has an unwanted note with the misspelled name. (People sometimes say there’s no “create note” action, but actually there are many ways to spoof Tinderbox into doing note creation by playing with $Container.)

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Thanks for sharing! I do something similar, although reading about your approach helped me rethink and simplify mine. To further automate things, I use a low-priority agent instead of a stamp—I assume you have a reason for sticking with a stamp?

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@Lucas I have been thinking about an agent. my reason for using the stamp is to give me time to fix things if I enter the wrong value, but a low priority agent might also give me enough time. I will give it a try. thanks!