Logbook

A command line tool to create and manage a digital logbook using vim, git, markdown and pandoc.

Motivation

After writing a (very incomplete, full of typos and still on alpha version) Operating Systems book from class notes I took on vim, I decided to automate and simplify both the note-taking and the note-curating process.

The alpha version of the book on Operating Systems can be download here.

The repository is available here.

Objective

The primary purpose of this tool is to ease the taking, managing and note curating process from classes.

To be effective, this tool must:

• Allow to take notes fast, from anywhere in the terminal and operative system
• Use a simple syntax to organize my notes
• Keep track of all the notes taken in a clean and organized way
• Enable the generation of eye-candy pdfs for printing and studying

Features

Courses notes

Create, organize, manage and keep track of all the notes.

It is possible to:

• Initialize a course: logbook --init-course <course-name>
• Add a new raw note to an existent course: logbook -c|--course -<note type> <course-name>
  • The note type indicates the type of raw note:
    • -t: Theoretical class
    • -p: Pratical class
    • -o: Ordinary note
• Publish raw, curated notes or book chapters logbook p|--publish <note name>
• List all existent courses logbook -lc|--list-courses

Some additional features consist on:

• Raw notes being named using the type of note and the date
• Every raw note added/saved is automatically committed to the course repo
• Statistics related to number of lines, words and characters of the note are presented upon saving
• Supporting todo list in the note.
  • Just write __TODO__ in any place on the task sentence.
  • Upon saving, the line and the task are printed in a list for easy copy-past

Documents

The document module allows the continuous editing of one file documents. Documents such as wish lists, reports, minutes, records or even formal emails.

It is possible to:

• Create/Open a document: logbook --doc "<doc name>"
• Creat a symbolic link in the current directory to the document: logbook -s|--symbolic-link "<doc name>"
• List the name and the first 3 lines of all existing documents: logbook -ld|--list-documents

Note: the option --new-docis deprecated. Use --doc instead

Journaling

Later on, I merged my journaling cli-tool with the logbook tool.

The journaling features allow to:

• Keep a digital journal
• Save quotes
  • Using markdown quote syntax, >
• Tag sentences/documents and search later
  • A tag is used as __TAG__

The journal is organized using directories and plain-text files, for preventing problems of compability as the years roll by.

The directory structure is as follows:

├── 2017                      # A directory for each year
│   └── ...
└── 2018
    ├── February              # A subdirectory for each month
    │   ├── 01-Feb-2018.md    # A file for each day
    │   ├── ...
    │   └── 28-Feb-2018.md
    ├── January
    │   ├── 01-Jan-2018.md
    │   ├── 02-Jan-2018.md
    │   └── ...
    └── March
        ├── 02-Mar-2018.md
        ├── ...
        └── 30-Mar-2018.md

Each file is organized as follows:

# Friday, 30  March of 2018   # First line of the file indicates the day of the week and the date

## 15:09:25                   # Date when each entry started
This is a entry

## 16:29:04
This is another

Help menu

USAGE: logbook <options> <args>\n
options
   -j|--journal:         Creates a new journal entry.        
   -t|--tag <tag_name>:  Fetch all journal entries by <tag_name>
   -q|--quote:           Fetch all quotes in journal entries

   --init-course:        Initializates a new course in the current directory.
   -c|--course:          Adds a new raw note to a previously created course unit.
   -p|--publish:         Publish raw/curated note, or any given markdown file
   -lc|--list-courses:   Lists all courses
   
   --new-doc:            Initializes a new document # Deprecated. Use --doc instead
   --doc:                Creates and/or edits an document
   -s|--symbolic-link:   Creates a symbolic link in the current directory to a document
   -ld|--list-documents: Lists all created documents

   -h|--help:            Shows this menu.\n"

Licensing

The code is licensed under MIT License.