.org fs

Important - this code is frozen: After recent org-mode changes, attach code in org-mode have been modified and not compatible anymore with this repo.

Disclaimer: The package is experimental and tested only with my own configuration. Anyone trying to use the package will probably need to fix many bugs. PRs are welcome.

I usually have a huge numbers of files, related to my projects. I would like to use attach to associate the files with the proper entry, but searching them later in my Dropbox is a pain because of the way Org saves the attachments. It makes more sense for me to make attachments follow the org tree structure in the project by default (unless I change the attach folder to something else).

This can be done if we make attachment by creating a symbolic link to the attach folder in the place, according to the headline path. This way allows to keep all the file attached to the project accessible with relative paths.

Important: The package expects all the attachments to be accessible from any org file. I use the following config to achieve this:

(require 'f)
(setq org-attach-id-dir "~/.data/")
(setq org-id-locations-file
      (f-join org-attach-id-dir ".org-id-locations"))

Implementation

For the implementation, the idea is keeping all the actual attachments in a common folder for all the org files according to their uuid. As a result, I can safely refile tasks between different org files without worrying about moving the attachments around (assuming that there is not change in the task ids).

The above does not follow the task hierarchy of the tasks. To implement this, for each task, I store the symlinks to the child tasks in the task’s attachment directory. Therefore, apart from the attachments, I have yant/org-attach-symlinks-directory folder in the task’s attach dir. This folder contains a back reference to the attachment dir (if there are attachments) yant/org-attach-attachments-symlink-directory and symlinks to the corresponding symlink folders of the children with attachments somewhere down the hierarchy.

Now, it is trivial to create the attachment hierarchy for any org file. I just make folders pointing to the yant/org-attach-symlinks-directory of the top level tasks either in the same folder with the org file or in yant/org-attach-file-symlink-path (file local).

When I have the mirror attach folder structure, it make sense to open this structure on org-attach-reveal instead of opening the actual attach dirs.