Show HN: Dnote – Instantly Capture Your Coding Wisdom | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dnote – Instantly Capture Your Coding Wisdom

dnote.io

100 pointsstockkid57 comments

I made Dnote because even though I learn many things every day while coding, I forget most of them. The reason is that (1) I don't write them down (2) I don't revisit what I write down.

So I made a CLI to keep track of my engineering microlessons with minimal friction, without leaving the command line. Next step is to build automated digest email so that I actually remember my lessons.

I wrote more about why and how I am building it here: https://sungwoncho.io/making-dnote

Thanks for posting it!

I've been wanting to actually write an identical tool but for a daily diary.

very cool tool, I'll integrate it into my workflow this week and see what happens.

Looks like a cool project!

I noticed a small typo:

> Reinforce your knowledge effor[t]lessly

Fixed. Thanks for letting me know.

I like the idea is being able to subscribe to other developers.

If you could like or down vote notes, and if you could publish notes to channels ( i checked and you already have that, dnote use, to make a book ), and subscribe to devs channels it would be cool.

I also think like a vim plugin that could bring up dnotes on Promise when you ctrl-something on the word Promise in your code, and a way to full text search, and if you automatically surfaced notes at intervals for learning, could be good ideas for this.

https://github.com/dnote-io/cli/blob/master/main.go#L271

Pinging your personal server every time someone runs your CLI tool is not something people would expect or be happy to learn about after the fact.

I understand you're curious how many people are using your tool, but this isn't the way to go about it.

> I understand you're curious how many people are using your tool, but this isn't the way to go about it.

Not OP, but what is the correct way to go about it?

Being up front about it, and opt-in.

I understand your concern. I added it in the initial release as a quick hack to see if others will use the tool. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

This is cool, but why does it need to do the heartbeat with dnote.io?

https://github.com/dnote-io/cli/blob/master/main.go#L272

This looks like the only place that you're doing a network request, and it really slows down the program.

I added it to see if other people will actually use the tool, and if I should invest time improving it.

I plan to either remove it in the next patch or sending heartbeat less frequently. In terms of privacy, how do you feel about it?

I'd say at the very least, the heartbeat should be spawned asynchronously. As it is, someone DOS-ing your API could cause problems for every user.

What data does it transmit and is it opt-in?

It is a GET request without any extra data. It is not opt-in.

I think a quick:

  echo "you can write dev tools as shell functions" >>.notes

Would be pretty close to the same thing?

Well, there seem to be a few additional features:

1. being able to organize notes by "books" 2. being able to use it cross-platform (since both `echo` and `>>` don't exist in powershell)

I also like the emailing feature, but yeah, you could automate that with a chronjob.

Is not that not most applications though? It would be possible to do it yourself, but the application simplifies that process. Does not need to do more than so.

A famous (HN) example would be the first thread for Dropbox. I think people said "you could do this rsync".

You can have more than one file for books. And you can run bash in windows now.

If if you go with that, don't ever forget the second '>'! I know I have :)

echo "don't ever forget the second >" >>.notes

You'll remember it better if you do:

echo "don't ever forget the second >" > .notes

(Don't Do it...)

I've got `set -o noclobber` in my .bashrc, so this doesn't bite me:

  /tmp $ echo foo > test
  /tmp $ echo bar > test
  -bash: test: cannot overwrite existing file

This even uses immutable data structures. Thank you for making this!

I use a 20 line batch file saved as "jot.cmd" which does this roughly, it appends one liners to a particular note-log-file and it prepends the date if it is the first note of the day so I have a chronology. Also it cats the note file if sent an empty entry.

It is just a small part of my note keeping system, but I have often found it really convienient to be able to jot "asides" in the terminal like this.

>Would be pretty close to the same thing?

And one day you forget the second > and boom. There go your notes. Or at least the notes before the last backup.

Ok,

    function dnote () {
        echo "$1" >> ~/.notes
    }

You're right. That's pretty close. For a while, I actually did

    vim ~/dev/.note

and navigated to an an appropriate section whenever I wanted to write down something new I learned.

Nice tool to scratch your own itch. I've thought of doing something similar many times, but I've found that just using Evernote or Quiver and having a reasonable search works just fine for me since I tend to write meticulous notes. Having a separate tool might be an added behavior that discourages taking notes, but depends on each person's habits I suppose.

Yes, that exactly the barrier for me. I use Mindnode (Mac-only, but really just a straight-forward mind mapping tool). The barrier is remembering to have Mindnode up while I'm working, and then doing the appropriate copy/paste-age. Doing all that not curation in real time tends to take me out of the flow.

I like - and bought -Quiver, but I'm concerned with the lack of updates.

I'm a firm believer in not adding needless features just to stay busy. For example, I use DEVONThink, which has not really received any significant feature updates in a few years! I've also never felt 'bad' about the long period in which there was no development on Sublime Text.

But Quiver is far from 'good enough' for me. The popup-style search is nowhere close what I want, there's no keyboard shortcut to indent list items (at least not in Markdown mode), and there are tons of ways in which the app can and needs to be improved.

I bought it mostly because of its promise, and because the storage format is really nice. Furthermore, building a cross-platform Quiver (perhaps with Electron/React Native) with some specific DEVONThink-like features is high on my list of itches I've been meaning to scratch. But until I do so, or until active development on Quiver becomes evident, I can't help but feel slightly disappointed.

All that said I'm ultimately happy to have supported a developer who put out something nice with a great data format! Just being grumbly, I guess.

Well said, this reflects my experience using quiver.

I've been working on Collate https://collatenotes.com/ which you may find interesting. Quiver had some influence on the feature set but I've taken the good parts and added other neat features.

Give the free demo a try and see if it works for you.

That looks great! The landing page answered exactly my questions, so to the degree that I'm your target audience: that's really impressive.

Even more impressive considering that I absolutely and unreasonably loathe websites that mess with my scrolling, which yours appears to do. May I suggested turning that off :-)?

Anyways, I'll try it out and get back to you!

Yeah, sorry about the scroll jacking. I'm using some off the shelf wordpress theme and I can't figure out how to disable it! I'm going to dig into the codebase a little and see whats causing it.

Edit: Ha! Squashed the js that was causing the scroll jacking. Thanks for the bug report ;)

Collate looks amazing! I've been looking for exactly this, and since I use Linux rather than OS X quiver was out. Trying it out now and I'll almost definitely be purchasing.

Edit: Where can I file bug reports? :)

https://collatenotes.com/bug-report/

Also 0.2.4 should drop in a few days that fixes a ton of bugs. You can follow along on our roadmap here: https://trello.com/b/Mk4OWPJo

Yes. Evernote is good if writing long notes. I actually have a notebook called 'Coding' in my Evernote in which I write programming notes.

I think using something like `echo "note" >> .note` or Dnote can be good for writing a short oneliners and getting back to the original task, without losing focus.

Cool, similar to a system for line-based notes I've been using happily for about a year. I call it quickref, and the command is `qr`. This is my CLI usage:

  $ qr
    show available quickref files (in directory $QR)

  $ qr topic
    show all lines from $QR/topic.txt
    a "topic" can be anything, but generally something like a language (py),
    program (blender), package (django), command (git). also things like audio,
    pdf manipulation, CLI image editing.

  $ qr topic pattern
    show all lines from topic.txt that match regex pattern

  $ qr topic term1 term2 ...
    show all lines from topic.txt that match all terms

  $ qr add topic "line with spaces"
    append "line with spaces" to topic.txt

  $ qr edit [topic1 [topic2 ...]]
    open specified topics with $EDITOR

I don't personally see much value in sharing/aggregating the note files themselves, because it's all about personalized keywords.

I just took a look at the source, and I think this is the simplest non-trivial example of a Go command-line app I've seen. It's exactly what I've been looking for to get started with a tiny little project of my own.

Thanks for sharing!

In the writing animation, it's strange that the notes are deleted. I expected a fake "Enter" effect so the notes scroll upward like in a cli. (You will need a few more examples so the repetition is not annoying.)

I find jrnl (http://jrnl.sh/) fits this a most other uses I have of text capture at the command line.

consider spaced repetition to help the developer remember them (granted, that's a big scope change, so consider trade-offs between separate app vs embedded, etc)

if you use GTD or a similar personal productivity system you could integrate reviewing your notes into your weekly/daily review.

Why not use

    echo "crap" >> notes.md

It even supports markdown :D

Because what if you do this:

    # Good bye, everything up to this point
    echo "crap" > notes.md

Or are in another directory

In .bashrc:

    notes() {
      echo $1 >> $HOME/notes.md
    }

Now `notes 'blah blah'` wherever.

I have a bunch of small functions like this for various things in my day-job, it helps a lot.

Beware of keeping notes without properly escaping them. :)

This is really great, but the tagline sounds awkward. Something like "capture your most useful coding snippets" would be more to the point.

Nice! I would probably use this if there were a web front end where I could browse/search all the notes I'd taken.

Cool project. I use a journaling app with tags for things learned for a similar purpose.

Care to share a link?

http://dayoneapp.com/

Nice, but it shouldn't be restricted to coding, I think.

That's true. I guess places like https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned is kinda similar but more general.

A command line utility to do what can already be easily accomplished in the command line without installing anything extra... neat-o /s

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