A short tour of how the pieces fit together: write a note, find it again, turn a field into a browsable folder, and catch the vault up after editing behind ntropy's back. Every command here is in the Commands reference.
Write a note
Start with a thought:
ntropy new Refactor the parser
Your editor opens on a fresh note stamped from the default.md
Templates and daily notes. The
template already gives it a title and an empty tags list. Fill in the
tags, add a status field, and save:
---
title: Refactor the parser
tags: [work, programming/rust]
status: in progress
---
Any field you add is kept as it is, and every field is filterable by
existing. Nothing declares status anywhere.
Find it again
Later, find the note by tag, by status, or by a word you half remember:
ntropy search 'tag:work and status:"in progress"'
The whole expression sits in single quotes so the shell hands the inner
double quotes through to ntropy; a value containing a space, like
in progress, has to arrive double-quoted. Without the outer quotes the shell
strips the inner ones and the query fails with a syntax error.
A single match opens straight in your editor. Several drop you into the The interactive picker, where you narrow the list by typing and open the one you meant with Enter. The Query language has the rest of the grammar.
Turn a field into a folder
Say you browse by status often. Make it a Materialized views:
ntropy view add by-status --field status
Now by-status/in-progress/ is a real directory of symlinks. You can cd
into it, grep it, or open it in any editor, with no ntropy involved. The
value in progress became the directory in-progress because ntropy
lowercases and hyphenates grouping values, and the symlink inside is named
<date>-<slug>.md and points back at the note's file in all-notes/.
Catch up after edits outside ntropy
ntropy refreshes the views after every change it makes itself. Change a note's
status straight in your editor, without going through ntropy, and the views
do not know until you tell them:
ntropy reconcile
That moves the symlink to by-status/done/ (or wherever the new value
belongs), realigns any filename whose slug drifted from its title, and
re-syncs every view. The vault is back in step.