How to use vulpea-meta?

[hyan46]

I was from the Path to Org-roam v2 blog. I think the metalist is a great idea to solve the problem for filetags. I am trying to figure out how to use the metalist to manually diasable some tags from metalist.

The current problem is that there is no interactive functions in vulpea-meta.el. In this case, is there any way to add into the metalist interactively?

[d12frosted]

Ah, I think it's not well documented. Right now it has zero interactive functions, but I guess I might add something like vulpea-meta-add, vulpea-meta-remove etc. so they are kind of similar to org properties interactive functions. Will do it in org roam v2 branch.

Currently existing functions are meant for programmatic usage. Linked documentation list all available functions. For testing purposes you might use eval-expression, e.g. M-: (vulpea-meta-set "SOME-NOTE-ID" prop-name value) <ret>.

There might be a very valid question - what are the differences between properties drawer and meta list? To name a few:

1. Properties has better out of box support in Org mode. They expose pretty much everything you need to use them. And they are mature unlike vulpea-meta, which supports now only stuff I am using. Hence it doesn't have interactive functions (yet).
2. Expanding file level properties drawer by default requires configuration or hacks if you wish to hide all headings, but show properties drawer. File level meta list is always visible :)
3. Properties can't have link values by definition. You can put them there, but elements API will not treat them as links, meaning that Org roam will not recognize them as roam links. It might be fixed in the future (or already fixed), but properties were not meant to be used with links. vulpea-meta supports links and links to notes (meaning that you get a vulpea-note as a value, no need to convert anything by yourself). See supported types.
4. Handling of list values is different. With properties drawer you can't have duplicating keys, meaning that a list must be serialized properly (e.g. use a separator and quoting of the values). vulpea-meta on the other hand works fine with lists as it allows multiple keys to be present in the list.

Hope that helps. Please let me know if you need any further assistance or functionality :)

[hyan46]

Thank you for the clarification! Finally have some time to try these functionalities.

Overall, the eval-expression way indeed works pretty well. Adding a small function of vulpea-meta-add, vulpea-meta-remove would definitely be helpful and look forward to it.

For a tagging system, I think it is important to be searchable. I think the filetags can be queried by vulpea-find so it is quite useful.
Currently, I am not sure either the vulpea-meta or Propertise can be queried. One of my workflow is to use the org-roam and set links with meta list and use backlink to query the file node. Not sure if this is the best approach or if vulpea-meta or Properties would support query.

[d12frosted]

Cool, I will then implement some interactive functions. You can subscribe to #98.

Properties can't be via vulpea right now, this is a good point and is quite easy to fix (created a ticket #97). Regarding meta accessible via vulpea-note - it's something on my radar, cause I also need to query by these values and right now I have to perform excessive parsing :(

[d12frosted]

BTW, it's all implemented now. Properties are part of vulpea-note as well as meta. Using for few months already and love it.