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CLI Tricks: n - note taking | |
March 21st, 2018 | |
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This is the first in a series of phlog entries where I will share | |
some of my command line tricks, tips and scripts. | |
## n ## | |
Note-taking in the terminal is a big deal for me. Whether I'm in | |
a meeting or someone stops by for a quick interruption, I need to | |
be able to jot down notes quickly and get at them again easily. To | |
handle this I have built a helper function called "n". | |
Note: If you are familiar with my dotfiles [0] then you know | |
I keep all these scripts in a folder called ~/.functions and | |
source them as part of my .bash_profile. | |
### The Idea ### | |
When I'm on the command line I enter the command "n" and it pops | |
up a list of all my notes using the FZF [1] fuzzy finder. These | |
have a nice preview window to the side so I can quickly scan what | |
I'm looking for as I type in parts of the name. If I see what | |
I need in the preview I can either hit ESC to quit back to my | |
shell or ENTER to open up the note in my EDITOR. | |
Creating a new note is easy: | |
$ n monkeys | |
> creates a new note in my NOTE_DIR called monkeys.md (I default | |
> all my notes to markdown) and opens it in EDITOR | |
Want to categorize them? Add a folder path: | |
$ n animals/monkeys | |
> creates a new note at $NOTE_DIR/animals/monkeys.md and opens | |
> it in EDITOR | |
You can search foldernames as part of the fuzzy-finding. | |
The script also has bash-completion built-in. If you don't want to | |
use FZF to browse for the file, just type part of the word and hit | |
tab, like so: | |
$ n mo<TAB> | |
> n monkeys<ENTER> | |
### Requirements ### | |
This requires FZF [1], a fantastic utility for fuzzy-finding. I'm | |
sure you could port it to another tool if you really wanted, | |
though. | |
This also requires that you have an environment variable set | |
called NOTE_DIR. For me that points to Dropbox where I have a | |
notes folder. This means all my notes are generated and stored | |
there and are shared across systems. I can even get at them | |
with my phone. | |
### The Source ### | |
#!/usr/bin/env bash | |
# Note taking function and command completion | |
_n() { | |
local lis cur | |
lis=$(find "${NOTE_DIR}" -name "*.md" | \ | |
sed -e "s|${NOTE_DIR}/||" | \ | |
sed -e 's/\.md$//') | |
cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]} | |
COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$lis" -- "$cur") ) | |
} | |
n() { | |
: "${NOTE_DIR:?'NOTE_DIR ENV Var not set'}" | |
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then | |
local file | |
file=$(find "${NOTE_DIR}" -name "*.md" | \ | |
sed -e "s|${NOTE_DIR}/||" | \ | |
sed -e 's/\.md$//' | \ | |
fzf \ | |
--multi \ | |
--select-1 \ | |
--exit-0 \ | |
--preview="cat ${NOTE_DIR}/{}.md" \ | |
--preview-window=right:70%:wrap) | |
[[ -n $file ]] && \ | |
${EDITOR:-vim} "${NOTE_DIR}/${file}.md" | |
else | |
case "$1" in | |
"-d") | |
rm "${NOTE_DIR}"/"$2".md | |
;; | |
*) | |
${EDITOR:-vim} "${NOTE_DIR}"/"$*".md | |
;; | |
esac | |
fi | |
} | |
complete -F _n n | |
[0] tomasino's dotfiles | |
[1] FZF |