Features of the file-naming scheme for searching or filtering

By default, file names have three fields and two sets of field delimiters between them:

ID--TITLE__KEYWORDS.EXTENSION

When a signature is present, this becomes:

ID==SIGNATURE--TITLE__KEYWORDS.EXTENSION

Field delimiters practically serve as anchors for easier searching. Consider this example:

20220621T062327==1a2--introduction-to-denote__denote_emacs.txt

You will notice that there are two matches for the word ‘denote’: one in the title field and another in the keywords’ field. Because of the distinct field delimiters, if we search for ‘-denote’ we only match the first instance while ‘_denote’ targets the second one. When sorting through your notes, this kind of specificity is invaluable—and you get it for free from the file names alone! Similarly, a search for ‘=1’ will show all notes that are related to each other by virtue of their signature.

Users can get a lot of value out of this simple yet effective arrangement, even if they have no knowledge of regular expressions. One thing to consider, for maximum effect, is to avoid using multi-word keywords as those can get hyphenated like the title and will thus interfere with the above: either set the user option denote-allow-multi-word-keywords to nil or simply insert single words at the relevant prompts.