I have a collection that I intend to use for project management, using subfolders for each project. I’d like to use a repeatable scheme when recording certain aspects of a project as individual notes in a subfolder collection (e.g., “Draft”, “Resources”, etc.).
As I’d expect per Notenik’s usual behavior, duplicate note titles are differentiated with a number after the title (in this case when initiated and accessed from the root “Projects” collection).
I’d like to use Note IDs to avoid this. The problem is that I don’t think the feature allows for renaming files in a collection with subfolders.
This code block has line breaks inserted for readability:
Could not rename file from /Users/user/collection/01 - Projects/Test.txt to
/Users/user/collection/01 - Projects/Subproject 25-05 Test.txt due to Error
Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4 "“Test.txt” couldn’t be moved to “01 -
Agenda” because either the former doesn’t exist, or the folder containing the latter
doesn’t exist." UserInfo={NSSourceFilePathErrorKey=/Users/user/Collection/01 -
Agenda/Test.txt, NSUserStringVariant=(
Move
), NSDestinationFilePath=/Users/user/Collection/01 - Projects/Subproject 25-05
Test.txt, NSFilePath=/Users/user/Collection/01 - Projects/Test.txt,
NSURL=file:///Users/user/Collection/01%20-%20Projects/Test.txt,
NSUnderlyingError=0x600003ef6af0 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=2
"No such file or directory"}}
This error will loop indefinitely. Meaning the error message will keep appearing and the software will apparently attempt (and fail) to rename the file again.
Attempted workaround
Changing the Note ID configuration for each individual collection within a subfolder does not prevent Notenik from treating notes with shared file names like they have duplicate titles (i.e., the Note ID’s are not recognized when working in the master collection).
I hope that I was able to sufficiently explain my observations. If there’s anything else I can provide please let me know.
I assume the error message is occurring as part of the attempt to change the Note ID for the collection, and I assume that you’re changing it from an ID of just Title – but what are you trying to change it to?
What is the actual starting path (folders plus filename) for the Test.txt file? And what are you expecting the end path to be?
What is the overall projects collection? And what is the sub-folder we are dealing with?
Errors have occurred while attempting two configurations, both with the option “Title after auxiliary field”: Project (the label for the Folder field) and Timestamp.
Expected change (with Timestamp…I just realized using the Folder would be a lot in this scenario): ~/isaa/Guerilliteracy/01 - Agenda/OR - Anti-Intellectualism 46-11/20250504121410 Test.txt
The overall projects collection is ../../01 - Agenda and the subfolder in question is the one given above as well, but there are other subfolders also like ../OR Skirmish 11-46.
I hope this is useful. Happy to help with anything else.
Interesting. If you change the Note ID to project/folder + title, then file renaming shouldn’t even really be necessary, right? Because the subfolder name already provides the needed uniqueness at the file system level.
I don’t object to this. Not renaming files in this circumstance is preferable to renaming them in my opinion. And even more so if it saves the effort of having to recursively rename files.
If I may offer a further opinion, then I can’t think of any circumstance where the subfolder alone wouldn’t suffice to distinguish files with identical titles at the root level. The fact that Note IDs can still be configured for subfolder collections is helpful to know from my perspective.
Although you’d do better than me at anticipating any qualifying use cases in that respect.