Feature request: Smarter note housekeeping (delete notes based on 'last time read')

[asn-d6]

Hello,

I'm a big fan of deft, and through my years of use I have accumulated about 600 notes. Out of all those notes, most of them (400+) are ancient notes that I will never ever use in my life again. For example, I make quick notes all the time that I use once or twice and then they just rot there.

Having so many notes makes my deft home screen almost unuseable: it's very cluttered and also a bit slower to load.

What would be the right way to do notes housekeeping? I've been thinking that I could add a (deft-housekeeping) command that deletes notes that haven't been read in over N months. So like, if I haven't opened a note for two years, it will delete it (or ask y/n to delete it).

Do you think such a thing would be useful, or in scope for deft? Or does it exist already?
Or should this be done as an emacs hook so that it's completely third party?

If this is not possible, how would you suggest I go around implementing this? (my elisp is subpar, but I can try)

[0fiscalentropy]

If I'm not mistaken, this could be done by firstly checking the atime (date last opened) for all the files in the directory and then call deft-archive-file on the files that haven't been opened in the last N months. Don't know much elisp, so wouldn't know exactly how to implement it in Emacs, but you could use find:

find ~/.deft -type f -atime +X -delete,

where X is the number of days.

edit: not a good idea to use atime since deft access (all?) the files on startup; better to use mtime

[asn-d6]

Thanks for the help! Closing this!