jeboothjr / set-accessed-time

Obsidian Set Accessed Time - MacOS

Use at your own risk

I'm not really supporting this, but thought it could be useful for others.

When using Obsidian on MacOS, the "date last opened" is not updated when a file is opened. There are no settings. This is useful for tracking notes that haven't been opened in a while and may need to be archived.

This plugin simply touches the file on open, setting the access time on the file. While the atime on the time is set, you will not see "Date Last Opened" updated in the finder. You can run ls -ltu on the folder and see that it is updated.

With this plugin in place, you can use DataView to show all of the files that haven't been opened in n days.

The example below shows all files last opened more than 7 days ago and excludes the _templates and _archive folders:

Files Opened > 7 days ago
```dataviewjs
const TIME_CRITERIA = '+7';
const ASCENDING = true;
const BASE_PATH = dv.app.vault.adapter.basePath;
const ChildProcess = require("child_process");
const PRUNE = ' ! -path "{P}" '
const EXCLUDES = ['_templates', '_archive'];
let excluded = EXCLUDES.map((x) => PRUNE.replace('{P}', `${BASE_PATH}/${x}/*`)).join('');
const COMMAND = `find ${BASE_PATH} -type f -name "*.md" -atime +7 ${excluded} -exec sh -c 'file="{}"; atime=$(stat -f "%a" "$file"); formatted_date=$(date -jf "%s" "$atime" "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" 2>/dev/null); [ -n "$formatted_date" ] && echo "[[$file]] $formatted_date"' \\; | sort -k 2 ${ASCENDING ? '-r' : ''}`;
ChildProcess.exec(COMMAND, BASE_PATH, (err, stdout, stderr) => {
	let lines = stdout.toString().split('\n');
	let result = lines.map((line) => {
		if(!line.length) return;
		return `${line.replace(`${BASE_PATH}/`, '')}`;
	})
	result = result.join('\n');
	dv.span(result);
});

The code could be cleaned up but it works.

CAVEAT - The DataView doesn't pick up these changes and auto refresh. You can just keybind the DataView force refresh, though, if it bothers you.

If there is anything wrong with the command, blame ChatGPT. ;)

To use it, create a set-accessed-time folder in your .obsidian/plugins folder. Drop the main.js and manifest.json files from the root of the repo into it. Restart Obsidian and enable in the Community Plugins section.

Support the development of the plugin