add ability to list note timestamps

[nicknickel]

Overview

This PR addresses #90 by adding a flag to the view subcommand that lists the note's creation timestamps rather than the note IDs. I know that issue is pretty old at this point but it seemed like a neat feature and simple enough to implement. Even so, I don't mind if you don't want to merge this.

Show and tell

Output of dnote view --help for reference

List books, notes or view a content

Usage:
  dnote view <book name?> <note index?> [flags]

<truncated for brevity>

Flags:
      --content-only   print the note content only
  -h, --help           help for view
      --name-only      print book names only
  -t, --timestamps     print creation timestamp of notes rather than IDs

The resulting output would look like the below.

# dnote a Logbook -c "I edited a file"
# dnote a Logbook -c "I saved the file"
# dnote a Logbook -c "I phoned a friend"
# dnote view Logbook --timestamps
  • on book Logbook
  (2023-02-21 21:31:16) I edited a file
  (2023-02-21 21:31:30) I saved the file
  (2023-02-21 21:31:42) I phoned a friend

[sungwoncho]

Hi @nicknickel, thanks for the effort for trying to close the long living feature request #90. The code is pretty reasonable.

Before talking about code, I would like to discuss how this project should decide whether to add a feature. I should have clarified it way before, so it's my bad. I didn't do it because this project didn't receive feature contributions very frequently.

When adding new code, I think we must ensure that it is long-term, simple, and open. I added the following tenets in the project wiki to provide more detail: https://github.com/dnote/dnote/wiki#tenets. Let me know what you think.

The timestamp could be useful to some users. Since I don't have a solid data to back that up, I would like to go back to the long-term and simple tenet. As a start, could you describe how useful you would find this feature in your experience?

---

Tagging @robertmartin8 and @colearendt who originally interacted with #90. Please let me know how you feel about this change, if it is still relevant. Thanks.

[sungwoncho]

What do you think about showing the ID as well as the timestamp?

dnote v --timestamps mybook 
(1) [2023-02-22 00:00:01] note 1 with a multiple lines of content [---More--]
(2) [2023-02-22 00:00:02] note 2

Might be helpful in case we want to expand the contents of a note

dnote v 1

[nicknickel]

I like it. I went ahead and updated the output to look like you indicated above.

[sungwoncho]

The logic for formatting the note content seems to be getting more complicated. What do you think about creating a separate function, and unit testing?

[nicknickel]

I agree on both fronts. I went ahead and created a separate print note line function like what's there for printing book lines. I also added some tests that execute a view on notes. I added 3 tests which may be overkill. Let me know if that's too much.

[nicknickel]

@sungwoncho - This feature isn't critical to my workflow and I would consider it a nice-to-have; information I would find neat but not ultimately obstructing my usage. But, for what it's worth, I don't follow the same workflow mentioned in the issue this addresses so getting more feedback from other users would be good.

I think those are solid tenets for this project. I would imagine that not implementing certain features that add complexity might detract some users from adopting dnote but other users would be attracted because of the tenets. Ultimately you can't please everyone so having tenets will help make those decisions.

[sungwoncho]

Thanks for the feedback. Let us wait for more evidence that users need this feature, so that we can make reasonable trade-off based on the tenets.