Taking notes on the command line
Everyone has their own pet setup; here's mine. Its just a bunch of text files, shared on Dropbox.
I have a bash alias to make a directory if required, create the file, and open it in Vim.
Within the file, I use markdown for text, and a few additional conventions to make it easier to search through them.
I use one file per date, with the name being something like ~/notes/2013/07/24.
The following one-liner in my .bashrc accomplishes this:
# Bring up the day's notes
function diary() {
year=`date "+%Y"`
month=`date "+%m"`
day=`date "+%d"`
diarydir=~/Dropbox/personalnotes/$year/$month
if [[ ! -d "$diarydir" ]]; then
mkdir -p "$diarydir"
fi
vi $diarydir/$day
}
I also use some additional metadata within it, such as adding '@14:45' to indicate a timestamp before a paragraph, and '#category' to mark off sections (I use '##category' to denote one-line or one paragraph sections, otherwise all text is assumed to belong to the last declared section).
For convenience, I defined the following mapping in my ```.vimrc``` that inserts the timestamp when required:
nmap <C-c><C-t> o@<C-R>=strftime("%H:%M")<CR><CR><CR>
I'll cover the retrieval part of this in a separate post. If you don't have any note taking system yet, and don't want to go to the extent of blogging every little thing you want to note down, and find it a bit of a hassle to open up Evernote or something similar to jot something down, you might like to try this quick and simple text-based solution!