Copy and Paste Metadata

Copy/Paste Metadata

If you’d like to copy the Activity, Category, and Tags (collectively called the metadata) from one Fact to another, use Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v.

  • Find the Fact whose metadata you’d like to copy, and press Ctrl-c.
  • Then jump to the Fact you want to apply it to, and press Ctrl-v.

You can also choose just a single metadata value to copy, by adding a prefix key before Ctrl-c:

  • To copy only the Activity@Category, type A, then Ctrl-c.
  • Likewise, to copy only the Tags, press T and then Ctrl-c.
  • You can also copy the description with D and then Ctrl-c.

Then just Ctrl-v paste like you normally would.

Ornate Paste Shortcuts

dob offers a few commonly executed command sequences as one command, such as pasting any Fact’s metadata to the final, active Fact.

  • Press Ctrl-e to copy the current Fact’s metadata and apply it to the final Fact.

You can also paste-forward the current Fact’s metadata to a new Fact.

  • Press V if you’d like to copy the metadata to a new Fact, starting “now”.

    dob will copy the current Fact’s metadata, jump to the final fact, stop it, go “right” to the new active Fact, and then paste the metadata.

Custom Paste Commands

You can define your own custom key bindings for pasting arbitrary Fact metadata.

You can apply any combination of Activity@Category, Tags, and description.

Just add two settings to your user config for each custom mapping.

  • One setting specifies the Factoid to parse, and the other is the key binding to use.

    • Nest them under the [custom-paste] config section.

    • Name one using the prefix, factoid_, followed by a number from 1 to 28.

      Name the other using the prefix, mapping_, followed by the same number.

  • For instance, within ~/.cache/dob/dob.conf, here are some custom mappings:

    [custom-paste]

# Paste act@gory and 2 Tags:
factoid_1 = "Tea@Personal: #biscuit #zinger"
mapping_1 = f4

# Paste act@gory, 1 tag, and a description (if not already set):
factoid_2 = "Tickets@Project: #num-1234: Working on baloney."
mapping_2 = f5

# Paste a few Tags (the @: is required):
factoid_3 = "@: #tag-1 #tag-2"
mapping_3 = f6

# Paste a mere description:
factoid_4 = "#this is not a tag"
mapping_4 = f7

    In this example, press F4, or F5, etc., to apply that command’s metadata to the current Fact.

    Note that there’s an arbitrary limit of 28 such custom paste commands. I.e., the last pair dob looks for is factoid_28 and mapping_28.

  • See dob add --help for more help on the so-called Factoid format.

    Or just follow the formats in the example above.