Modifying note creation time?

General
1

Hi!

I’m wondering if there’s any way to modify the creation time of notes indexed by SilverBullet, or perhaps get it to read the values from the filesystem rather than using the time at index?

I’m a new SilverBullet user and have a bunch of old notes I’d like to import with accurate creation times. I’ve tried modifying the filesystem creation times but it doesn’t seem like SilverBullet reads these when indexing.

Thanks in advance for any help.

2

This is something I’d wanted, but had to end up just adding a “birth” property to the frontmatter

1 Like
3

This seems like a bug. What version are you running and on what system (filesystem)? Maybe open a github issue.

1 Like
4

Thanks. Being a new user and also new to Lua, I wasn’t sure if I was just missing something obvious. I’m running version 2.3.0-0-g21ddcb46 on XFS on Unraid.

For context, I’m just trying to render a table with links to recently created notes & their creation dates:

${query[[
  from p = index.tag "page"
  order by p.created desc
  select {
    name = "[[" .. p.name .. "]]",
    created = p.created
    )
  }
  limit 20
]]}

This seems to just give me the date/time at time of index for each page.

5

I’ve just tested this on an ext4 system and have the same issue. It records the lastModified date correctly but not the creation date.

SilverBullet properties:

Screenshot 2025-12-02 at 5.29.58 pm
Screenshot 2025-12-02 at 5.29.58 pm1548×204 13.4 KB

stat output:

stat README.md                                                       !10079
  File: README.md
  Size: 252       	Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 259,3	Inode: 73570256    Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1000/   james)   Gid: (  100/   users)
Access: 2025-12-02 17:13:13.905685107 +1100
Modify: 2025-07-12 13:01:46.602344038 +1000
Change: 2025-07-12 13:01:46.602344038 +1000
 Birth: 2025-07-12 13:01:46.602344038 +1000
6

FWIW, I’ve created an issue for this here.

1 Like