Utility command: Generate a new ID about zk

[mickael-menu]

I'd like to avoid exposing internal utilities to keep the CLI interface simple.

However, I've been thinking of two different features that could produce a similar output. Both of these solutions assume you have a template at ~/.config/zk/templates/id.md containing:

{{id}}

---

First option, a new --dry-run flag for zk new, which instead of writing the file would:

• Print to stderr the new note file path.
• Print to stdout the content of the generated note, as it would have been written at the path.

In your case, you could use it like this:

$ zk new --dry-run --template id 2> /dev/null
a65c8b45d

---

The second option is similar: adding a new command dedicated to render a template. I think this could be useful to expand templates inside notes that are already existing, for example to add a YAML frontmatter.

I'm not sure exactly how it would look like, but it could be something like:

$ zk render id
a65c8b45d

---

What do you think? The --dry-run flag could be faster to implement as its semantics are clear. Eventually, both solutions could be useful to have.

Also for which use case do you need this exposed in the LSP server? I guess the dry-run flag could be exposed for zk.new and the returned value could be a JSON with keys path and content.

[nogweii]

Adding --dry-run to new would solve my use case, so that would be nice.

Adding a render command would be very interesting. Either solution solves my use case, so I'd leave it to you to decide which path to pursue first.

Also for which use case do you need this exposed in the LSP server?

Thinking about it some more, it's not super useful to be directly exposed in the LSP server. I was thinking it would be easier to thus bind it to a keyboard shortcut; I could just as easily launch the zk CLI with whichever solution. So it's not necessary for my use case.

Also thinking about this some more, I forgot about the {{ content }} template value, so some of this feature request is unnecessary. I do think either solution provides really useful tools for further scripting, so I'll leave this issue open for now, but feel free to close if you prefer.

[mickael-menu]

Okay, I'll go with --dry-run for now as it would be useful to debug templates and note configuration as well.

[mickael-menu]

@nogweii It's available in main

$ cat .zk/templates/id.md
{{id}}

$ zk new --dry-run --template id.md 2> /dev/null
ymkh

You might need to strip the extra newline that is appended to every generated note to only get the ID.