Help refile to daily (and create if necessary)

How To Requests
1

Many times I capture stuff into my general inbox.org file. Some of those entries later turn out to be notes that I want to keep, but don’t need to be their own note. Thus I would like to move them to the correct daily entry file.

I would like to figure out how to:

  • get the date of the current note from the CREATED property
  • see if a daily note for that date exists
  • if it does, refile it (preferably to the correct time between notes with already existing CREATED properties)
  • if it doesn’t, capture a new daily file with this note’s contents (leaving the note’s created property intact)

Has anyone else found a need for such a workflow? And if so, would you be willing to share your elisp-fu? :slight_smile:

2

Here’s some code I have that finds the daily file for a given date, and I think creates it if it doesn’t exist: doom.d/org-config.el at a7d12591576dad86f0e2412f39abe915247a746f · telotortium/doom.d · GitHub

I might have time to give a more detailed answer later.

3

I have a similar workflow - it’s not perfect (note the TODO in there) and is a bit hard-coded (~/todo is my org and org-roam dir), but it works for refiling from point to today, tomorrow, yesterday, selecting a daily, or a few other common refile targets:

;; from https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/8045/org-refile-to-a-known-fixed-location
(defun russ/refile-to (file headline)
  "Move current headline to specified location"
  (let ((pos (save-excursion
               (find-file file)
               (org-find-exact-headline-in-buffer headline))))
    (org-refile nil nil (list headline file nil pos))
    (switch-to-buffer (current-buffer))))

(defun russ/refile-to-daily (n)
  ;; TODO this seems to sometimes nest the `daily/` an extra time :/
  (let ((file-s (format-time-string "~/todo/daily/%Y-%m-%d.org" (time-add (* n 86400) (current-time)))))
    (save-excursion
      (org-roam-dailies-capture-tomorrow n t)
      ;; TODO write the file?
      )
    (russ/refile-to file-s "new")))

(comment
 (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d.org" (current-time))
 (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d.org" (time-add 86400 (current-time)))
 (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d.org" (time-add (* (- 1) 86400) (current-time))))

(defhydra hydra-org-refile-daily (:exit t)
  ;; TODO refile to today's daily note, create if it doesn't exist
  ("t" (russ/refile-to-daily 0) "Today")
  ("y" (russ/refile-to-daily -1) "Yesterday")
  ("T" (russ/refile-to-daily 1) "Tomorrow")
  ("j" russ/org-refile-to-daily-note "To some daily note" :column "Filter"))

(defhydra hydra-org-refile (:exit t)
  ("r" org-refile "Org refile" :column "~/todo")
  ("t" (russ/refile-to "~/todo/projects.org" "Todos") "project.org/Todos")
  ("h" (russ/refile-to "~/todo/projects.org" "Hammock") "project.org/Hammock")
  ("i" (russ/refile-to "~/todo/icebox.org" "new") "To icebox.org")
  ("p" (russ/refile-to "~/todo/principles.org" "new") "To principles.org")
  ("d" hydra-org-refile-daily/body "To some daily note"))

Source from my config if you’re digging: dotfiles/+org-custom.el at master · russmatney/dotfiles · GitHub

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