I’m currently evaluating Drafts’ trial on Mac and iOS. I would like to use Drafts to create text that I can later export into a ‘notes’ database in DevonTHINK.
My plan is to periodically export (or share) my drafts to DTPro and also archive them in Drafts so they are available in both apps for redundancy and convenience.
Does anyone know if this is possible? The options and actions I have seen so far do not include a way to achieve this.
Many thanks.
Exporting/sharing on has been Drafts’ raison d’être since inception, and Devon Think is all about getting information in and organising it. I think that’s a pretty good match for compatibility on the process you outlined.
You could have an action to trigger an export of drafts in your inbox, potentially matching additional criteria (e.g. a tag to indicate a draft is ready to be exported). When the action runs it could export the matching drafts, and set each one to move from inbox to archive within Drafts.
Have you checked the actions in the action directory, because a lot of them look like they would cover the exporting aspect to me; if not fully, then as an example that a more sophisticated action could be built upon, but honestly, the premise sounds like it would be a relatively simple action regardless.
Hope that helps.
Hello Marcus!
Your use case is exactly how I use drafts (in addition to other stuff). Notetaking on DTTG is cumbersome and not very fast.
Every note I want to keep I export easily to DT and safe it there. You can even specify the database and folder in DT where you want to store it. I bet with a bit knowledge of JavaScript you probably could even define the folder to save it from the tags of the draft.
Chrome
Thanks @sylumer I will dig deeper. I was on board with Drafts early in it’s development but it seems to have grown significantly since then. I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.
Thanks @Chrome, I look into the automation stuff and use a bit of DEVONthink 3 magic on smart groups too perhaps. Thanks for quick response from you and
@sylumer. Seems like a cool community here!
With useful pointers from @sylumer I wrote a backup script that finds all the notes, builds a JSON block and writes it to a Dropbox directory. It doesn’t strip any Markdown syntax, but that would be a possibility if I decided to go that way.
For me, the only missing part is an external trigger for the action script, but i’m looking into that as well. It’s not as straightforward as manipulating Drafts itself though.
I am looking to do the same thing, and before I move to iA Writer which does have a notes folder accessible directly by DT3, I wanted to develop that Action that would trigger an automatic export of all new notes in Drafts. So far I have not been able to do so, so if anyone writes an action that triggers on new Drafts and writes them to a folder that DT3 can index… I would love to use it.
That sounds like a useful approach. Would it be possible to share the script?
I’m still getting through the documentation and examples and I think one option is iterating a script over a series of drafts e.g. with a specific tag, and performing one of the existing share actions on all the relevant drafts. The tag can then be removed by DEVONthink using smart rules.