Simple note taking from the command line

    (echo && date && cat) >> ~/notes.txt

C-d remains constant, but it's irritating that there's no way to consistently abort.

To deal with this our edit target needs to be a temporary file which we subsequently bless, append to the notes file and then trash.

Keeping notes open in an editor buffer that I can jump to easily, and manually:

>> notes.md

From the command line gains me all the utility I need while using a modern machine and zsh.

Of course, if I time travel, the GP trick is useful on old ultrix machines.

Mainly because I figured would rather use GUI for notes on both desktop and mobile. Maybe one of these days I should give Standard Notes a try (https://standardnotes.org). It’s OSS and client side encrypted (afaik).

I have a feeling it's going to be my gateway into more heavy LaTeX usage for all manner of documents. The ability to evaluate code during document generation is a big deal to me.

    note() {
        echo "`date +%s`\t$1" >> ~/org/unsorted-notes.org
    }

    #!/bin/bash
    mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/scratch/$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")
    vim ~/Dropbox/scratch/$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")/$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S")

Would give you some rudimentary readline editing capability.

- 'notes' by itself views the file (interactive shell only)

- 'notes' with args, the args are appended to file (original function)

- 'notes' with heredoc (or any piped data) allows for multiline notes

    notes() {
      if [ -n "$1" ]; then
        echo $@ >> "$HOME/notes.md"
      else
        # detect if we're in a tty or a pipe
        if [ -t 0 ]; then
          less "$HOME/notes.md"
        else
          cat - >> "$HOME/notes.md"
        fi
      fi
    }



    usage:
    $ notes 1
    $ notes 1 2 3
    $ notes <<EOF
    > this is a 
    > multiline note
    > EOF
    $ uptime | notes
    $ notes
    (opens less with the following content)
    1
    1 2 3
    this is a 
    multiline note
     23:22:06 up 3 days, 11:41,  1 user,  load average: 0.25, 0.15, 0.26

Direct link: https://github.com/jad-issa/mplan-sh. Why post a link to a 6-months years-old HN submission with no comments?

You could adjust it so that it uses a central notes store on one ssh host pretty easily with something like:

  notes() {
      echo $1 | ssh user@remotehost "cat >> ~/notes.md"
  }

  read_notes() {
      ssh user@remotehost "cat ~/notes.md" | more
  }

    #!/bin/sh
    mkdir ~/.worklog || true
    if [ -z "$1" ]; then
       cat ~/.worklog/$(date +%w).md
    else
       echo "$(date): $*" >> ~/.worklog/$(date +%w).md
    fi

    $ worklog  "I did some stuff"
    $ worklog  [shows the output]