FR: Fix the `ctime` of .md files based on "Date Created" frontmatter.

Is Your Feature Request Related to a Problem? Please Describe.

Yes it is!!

One of the main pain point when migrating from Evernote to Obsidian is that the note’s ctime can often get lost/modified during syncing – either due to restrictions of sync services like Git (e.g. when i setup a new computer from a obsidian Git repo), or due to OS restrictions (Obsidian Sync cannot preserve file’s ctime on Linux),

To the point that, i cannot reliably view the notes sorted by their “create time” in the Obsidian’s Files Explorer.

Describe the Solution You’d Like

Since Linter already supports the feature to maintain a create timestamp in frontmatter, I wonder if it’d be possible to add a new option use create date YAML to set the ctime of the file, when they do not match.

Potential name for the new option: Sync "Date Created" to the file `ctime` (when mismatched)

Roughly logic (when the new option is turned on):

1. if “Date Created” YAML does NOT exist -> fill it in just like today
2. if “Date Created” DOES exist, and when it’s the SAME as the ctime of the file -> do nothing
3. if “Date Created” DOES exist, and is DIFFERENT than the ctime of the file -> Update the file’s ctime using the “Date Created” value

Describe Alternatives You’ve Considered

1. Currently, i rely on Dataview to generate a view using the “Date Created” frontmatter value. It works, but is somewhat awkward and requires keeping a separate note per folder that i’m interested in.

   It would be MUCH nicer if the sort order by “create time” in File Explorer can be reliably used 😃

2. Alternatively, i could do the above using a custom script, but it would be much nicer if this is built-in into Linter (for batch-fixing all my notes) 😃

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Thanks SO much for your considerations! 😃

(credit to @Antisimplistic on Discord for the brilliant idea!! 😃)

[pjkaufman]

I will close this once I get done with adding the lint all functionality for the custom lint rules. Thus far, I have been really trying to fix bugs and work out custom ignore rules. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer on this.

[pjkaufman]

I was thinkimg some more on this and I am not sure how maintainable that logic would be since it requires upsating file metadata. I am not saying it cannot be done, but testing and making sure it still works would require manual work since we would have to mock how obsidian works.