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Jote

Jote is a simple Markdown notes manager.

Why?

I wanted a simple way of organizing my notes, without being required to use a new editor, or being bound to a specific editor. By design, such a method should at minium be:

  • Frictionless to use, especially when adding a new note
  • Usable by any editor (that can be invoked by the command line)
  • Automatically backed by git
  • Able to support any hierarchy
  • Searchable via custom tags

Installing

For now, the easiest way to install is:

go install github.com/jhuntwork/jote/cmd/jote@latest

Usage

New notes

To create a new note, simply run jote new or just jote. If you have the EDITOR environment variable set, that command will be invoked to open a new file. The EDITOR command should block until the file is closed. For example, the default command is vim --nofork, which means vim launches in the foreground and will block until you close the editor. A similar command for VS Code would be code -w.

On first run, jote will initialize a git repository in ~/.local/share/jote. Because all further actions there are git actions, you can interact with it as you would any other git repository.

New files will contain the following template:

---
title:
tags: []
---

The section between the --- lines is considered front matter and is parsed as yaml. If you provide a title, the file will be saved as [title].md, otherwise the file will be named with a unix timestamp of the current time.

title is interpreted as a relative path in the git repository. This means that notes can support a structured hierarchy. For example:

title: recipes/Asian Food/Spicy Thai Noodles

The resulting file would be named ~/.local/share/jote/recipes/Asian Food/Spicy Thai Noodles.md.

tags is a list of strings, so it can either be specified like this:

tags: [one, two, "another tag"]

or like this:

tags:
  - one
  - two
  - another tag

Everything following the front matter section is the actual Markdown content.

Listing all notes

Run jote ls. This will provide a fzf-like interface (via go-fuzzyfinder) to list all notes. Selecting a note will open it for editing.

Changes made to pre-existing notes via the jote interface will result in a new git commit tracking that change. Changing the title will move the file to the new location.

Searching by tags

Run jote tags. This provides a fzf-like interface of all known tags, showing the associated documents for each tag. Select a tag and the interface will switch to a list of those documents, allowing you to select one for editing.

Future features

  • An opinionated way for syncing to a git remote, allowing for editing across machines. For now, this can be managed through manual git commands in the repository.
  • Outputting results of tag searches to stdout as a list, for consumption by other CLI tools.
  • More advanced searches by content.
  • Support a 'publish' keyword in the front matter. This could then be used by plugins to format and send documents to configured consumers.
  • Deleting notes.