shashankrao / notesdotpy

A simple command line note taking script written in Python.

notesdotpy

A simply command line note taking script written in Python. This is meant to facilitate "brain dumps" rather than organizing, rearranging, etc. However, the resulting file is a plain text file so you can re-organize to your hearts content.

Simply writes strings entered on the command line to a file (as specified in notes.cfg).

• New notes are appended at the end of the file
• Notes are formatted as markdown style list items (or equivalently YAML sequence items) so it's easy to import them into your other plain text based workflow.
• An ISO 8601 timestamp is appended to the end of each note (in square brackets).
• Notes are displayed using the shell command cat with line numbers
• TODO: Add line numbers display, using inbuilt python modules

This script was derived from a Python script found on the Rosetta Code website.

Installation

• put notes.py on your PATH and make executable (chmod +x notes.py)
• Copy notes.cfg to $HOME/.notes.cfg
• Edit .notes.cfg to set the notedir and notefile parameters to specify the directory and filename of your notes files

Optional:

• setup an alias in your .bash_profile, e.g. alias note="notes.py"
• additionally, setup another alias in .bash_profile, as alias rmnote="notes.py --delete"

Usage

• notes.py -- simply prints the contents of the file with line number
• notes.py "I wonder how fast an unladen swallow can fly?" -- adds note to file
• notes.py --delete 1 deletes the first note that you had created