External Workspaces

[guestieng]

The requested changes make it possible to choose between two basic types of workspaces for the notes and templates:

1. "internal" VSCode workspace: Watch and access the note and template folders within "internal" workspace (exclusive VSCode workspace)
2. "external" workspace: Watch and access the note and template folders within 'external' workspace ("external" with respect to VSCode workspace; INFO: this may include folders from the "internal" VSCode workspace)

The switch may be done via the config. property foam.files.workspaceType .

This feature allows to decouple the essential foam workspace from the VSCode workspace and provides better flexibility and less workflow complexity, particularly when working with multiple VSCode workspaces and projects.

The "external" and absolute note folder paths that are to be watched can be defined via the config. property
foam.files.externalWatchPaths .
The external and absolute template root directory path may be defined via the config. property foam.files.externalTemplatesRoot .

NOTE: The "external" path definitions may be defined such that either only a respective root directory or, in addition, a glob pattern is provided.

[riccardoferretti]

Thanks for the contribution @guestieng
Can you help me better understand the problem this PR addresses? Specifically, what user set up and/or use case is this meant to help with? Is there something that wouldn't be "reproducible" using workspaces with multiple folders?
In terms of Foam direction, especially in the context of using it as a web extension, I fear that the idea of "external" workspace would not easily work or require special handling. Do you have an idea of how that would work?

[guestieng]

Thanks for the contribution @guestieng Can you help me better understand the problem this PR addresses? Specifically, what user set up and/or use case is this meant to help with? Is there something that wouldn't be "reproducible" using workspaces with multiple folders? In terms of Foam direction, especially in the context of using it as a web extension, I fear that the idea of "external" workspace would not easily work or require special handling. Do you have an idea of how that would work?

In slightly more detail, the following problems are addressed:

When working with a couple of already existing workspaces (likely with multiple folders per workspace) in parallel, e.g. for different projects, or, respectively, when working with several generically created workspaces, it costs avoidable (e.g., by this pull request) time and effort to care about a notes folder in every workspace. Moreover, there are extensions like Continue which one might want to feed with an explicit and clean (workspace) codebase. Besides, personally, I would like to be able to always take notes (without loosing availability) in a very efficient manner, that is with a minimal set of user interactions, no matter how the workspace (settings) look like.
Of course, one could always open another VSCode instance for a foam workspace. But that demands additional resources.
What is more, it appears advantageous to me to not couple templates to the note workspaces/folders in a redundant manner as one may wish to use same templates in different (and "independent") VSCode workspaces.
Therefore, the current pull request introduces an option for defining an external template folder (via foam.files.externalTemplatesRoot), so that defining the templates location only needs to be done once, in the user settings, specifically, instead of in workspace settings.

As to your 2nd question, can you specify a little? For example, what do you refer to by "Foam direction" and how would the context of a web extension differ?