My response here is not entirely on point vis-a-vis the thread’s purpose (Sorry @TW_Tones!), but I’ve often wanted to modify the behavior of that “timestamps off” option.
I do often want to manually override a modified date in order to back-date something (so the timeline tracks something meaningful for my readers). But I’ve never wanted new tiddlers to be created without a create date. Unfortunately, “timestamps off” disables automatic creation dates as well as updating of modified dates.
And, as probably everyone who has ever toggled timestamps off can testify, if you FORGET to turn it back on (after doing whatever needing to be tinkered with), it can create a devil of a mess if you then have a slew of tiddlers entirely lacking in timestamps. (Especially if this has happened more than once, so it’s not necessarily simple to cook up a filter to catch just the recent batch.)
How easy would it be to tweak my “timestamps off” toggle so that there’s conditional behavior, so as to prevent free-floating timestamp-less ?
In other words: If a tiddler LACKS a create date when it’s saved (even with “most timestamps paused”), then saving an edit WOULD still give it a created timestamp (on the variation I’d prefer).
(Honestly I don’t care myself whether a newly created tiddler also gets an automatic modified value; I perefer that all tiddlers that I edit should always have some value in the modified field, whether assigned or automatic. For my use-cases, only a plugin shadow tiddler (or possibly tiddlers from some special-purpose reference set) should be present in my wiki without a modified value. But I’m not as worried about this detail. I just want a guardrail against accidentally generating 100%-timestamp-less tiddlers when I’m distractedly working in the shadow of a minor-touches task that required timestamps off.)
