dotfiles/doc/notes.md

Notes

Like most people, I needed a way to keep decent notes on my machines. The way that I prefer to take notes was writing text files with the option of grouping together hierarchical data into nested bullet-style lists.

Tools

Vim (or specifically Neovim) and Markdown for reading and writing have fit the bill very well for me. Git has worked amazingly for syncing/merging. I setup some bash aliases to allow me to do this without even thinking (or even automatically!) and note-taking life has been good ever since.

On occasion, I do want actual spreadsheets. I tend to use my fork of sc-im and a handful of Lua scripts for it. Primarily these are finance or D&D-related.

Full searchability of notes and spreadsheets is very important. Since my notes manifest as files on a filesystem, grep (or specifically ripgrep) is incredible. When I need to find files by their filename, I tend to use find (or specifically fd).

Navigating between notes is also very important. For the most part, vim's gf binding does the job. Barring that, [fzf] and good vim buffer management have worked brilliantly for me.

It's nice when editing your notes feels clean and comfortable and when they just look good. I really like the goyo vim plugin by junegunn to provide some space at times. Here's a link to a screenshot.

My notes repository is on a private Gitea instance which automatically gets mirrored to both GitHub and GitLab because redundancy is good and hooray for distributed software! If I wanted, I could easily setup auto-sync (even just add nsync & to the end of all the alises/scripts below would probably suffice), but I find that most notes are not so urgent to sync and that I am sure to do so if I need them. I should also probably encrypt/decrypt them on syncing.

I rarely ever make non-ephemeral notes on my phone and use Google Keep for those notes. If they are more static, I would just copy and paste later at a machine or if there is an emergency, I can absolutely edit my notes the same way I do on my laptop and desktop via termux where my vim and bash configurations just work.

Aliases

I have a handful of aliases (defined in scripts/bin) that do the large bulk of the work.

1. nf: Create a note file in the repo and open it in $EDITOR. This script is rarely invoked directly and is primarily used in subsequent scripts.
   • Arguments:
     • $1 must be the note's filename.
     • $2 may specify an optional subdirectory in the repo to place the file. I use this to segregate notes by categories such as work/postmates or personal/jesus or unsorted
   • Examples:
     • nf medical.md personal/finance
     • nf 2019-10-21_devotional.md personal/jesus
     • nf todo.md
2. N: Invokes nf adding .md to the end of the filename.
3. nd: Invokes nf prefixing the filename with YYYY-MM-DD_.
4. n: Combines N and nd resulting in a filename like $DATE$1.md.
5. nsync: Runs git add -A && git commit -m Updates && git pull && git push in the notes repository.
6. scn: Invokes nf overriding the $EDITOR variable with my spreadsheet editor.
7. s: Invokes nf _scratch.md which serves as both a scratchpad for temporary or very quick notes and as an index for gf-jumping (or fzf-ing) to other common files.

How Could This Improve?

• Automatic syncing
  • Cron jobs?
  • Building the syncing commands asynchronously into the aliases above?
    • Just add nsync &> /dev/null & to each script
      • Possibly hidden behind a flag so it can be disabled
      • Would probably need to add options to nsync so that any interactive stuff (which would fail) gracefully fails and notifies the user
• Encryption
  • I keep some personal information in these notes that I'd rather not have exposed on GitHub/GitLab in plaintext.
• Mobile editing workflow is less than ideal
  • While this isn't necessary, perhaps a way to take good notes on my phone might improve my workflow
• Accessibility
  • My notes are really only able to be interacted with from a machine that is provisioned and setup to do so (read: ssh keys). It might be nice to have them more available especially to my wife, church, etc. through some web portal.
    • Currently, I just use a pbin command and share the link, which works well enough.