note

Who needs a dedicated note taking application when you probably have already have a text editor on your computer that you like to use? All you need is a small command to help you create or edit notes.

This is a small script that works in conjunction with your editor to do just that. It will keep all your notes in a directory of your choosing and has some options for simple searching, the notes will be created with the markdown extension unless specify one when creating your note, check out the customise section for more details to change the default extension.

• Installation
• Usage
• Customise
• Command completion

Installation

• Download the repo.
• Run make all if you are happy with the default place for the script (/usr/local/bin) and the default directory to store the notes ($HOME/.notes). Otherwise read on.
• Ensure the script is in your $PATH. You can run make install to symlink the script to /usr/local/bin.
• By default notes are kept in $HOME/.notes, run make directory to create it. Alternatively if you know where you want your notes to live then export an environment variable called NOTES_DIR with the path to your chosen directory.
• Take some notes.

Usage

note [--help|-h]
     [--list|-l]
     [--search|-s <name>]
     [--text-search|-t <text...>]
     [--print|-p <name>]
     [--delete|-d <name>]
     [--] [<name>]

note on its own will open the directory. Behaviour is dependent on your editor.

note [--] <name> will look in your notes directory for a note with that name, if it doesn't find one it will create a new one. If there are multiple notes with that name you are presented with a choice. The -- will enable you to have dashes at the start of your note name.

note --list will display all the notes in your notes directory.

note --search <name> will search your notes directory for notes with that name.

note --text-search <text...> will search your notes for that text using grep.

note --delete <name> will attempt to delete that note.

note --print <name> will print the note to standard out

note --help will display command usage.

Customise

Set the EDITOR environment variable to your favourite editor, vim is the default.

Set NOTES_DIR to specify where you want to keep your notes, the default is $HOME/.notes

Set NOTE_EXT to specify which extension you would like new notes to have, the default is md.

Command completion

Currently there is only support for zsh command completion. It will present options available to you and the complete the names of notes you have in your notes directory.

• Generate the completion file by running make generate/zsh-completion.
• Run make install/zsh-completion to symlink to the newly created completion file from /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions. It uses sudo to create the symlink, so you will be asked for your password.
• Reload your shell. If command completion isn't working you may need to add compinit to your .zshrc file. echo compinit >> ~/.zshrc; source ~/.zshrc