I love Bike. But I also prefer library based apps! After pitching an idea for how to bridge this gap in this post here, I started working on a suit of shortcuts, to make it easier to have a Bike document be a hub for your other Bike files, as well as Markdown and TaskPaper files.
I think the shortcut is ready to be shared, so I would love it if anyone wants to test and see if it works on your end as well.
Here’s how it works:
The shortcut is run from a Bike document (let’s call it Document A), and what it does is either
- create a new document, or
- link to an existing document.
Then, in this second file (let’s call it Document B), it creates a backlink to the place in Document A you started the shortcut.
An example:
I want to create a new Bike document under Category B:
My cursor is here, and I hit the hotkey. I say I want to create a new Bike document, and give it a title.
It then creates the document - and you can see up top, that it adds a backlink to the Hub Document and Category B.
In the Hub Document, a link is made to the new document. It works the same with Markdown and TaskPaper files, but adds a different icon after the link, to show what type of link it is.
If you select text before firing the shortcut, that text will be used as title and hyperlink instead of you having to type it. The same is true for when you add a link to an existing document.
Here’s a video:
Usage
While the idea came from wanting a Bike document as a file hub/library, it of course works from any Bike document. So it can also be useful to just automate linking from Bike documents to other documents.
Installation and links
The main shortcut is called “Bike Hub”. And then I’ve made it modular - so you’ll need to download the modules as well. The current modules are:
- New Bike document module
- New (generic) Markdown document module
- New TaskPaper document module
- Link to Bike document module
- Link to other text file module
However, the idea is that people can make their own modules. The only thing that’s needed, is to make a shortcut that outputs a markdown link with whatever you want to be put into the Bike outline linked from (Document A).
I’ve tried to make is so that you can just remove menu choices from the main shortcut if you know there’s parts you wont use, and it should hopefully still work. 
When downloading the modules, you’ll be asked where you want the new files to be saved. You’ll probably also want to customise the modules with what you want these new files to be populated with.
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I not only hope this works for other people, but that it can be useful as well!
-Erlend
