Wiring Notational Velocity to a Github Wiki | Hacker News Reader

Wiring Notational Velocity to a Github Wiki

monkinetic.com

27 pointssteveivy12 comments

Copying my comment from the blog:

Instead of running a sync script every minute, you can just use filesystem events [1] notification to run your commit script every time a file is changed. I have used the ruby wrapper for it [2], but apparently there's a perl one as well [3].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSEvents [2]: https://github.com/sandro/ruby-fsevent [3]: http://search.cpan.org/~agrundma/Mac-FSEvents-0.04/lib/Mac/F...

Oh, interesting; I was looking for something like this but hadn't worked out what to search for. Will read up on it for sure.

Also, I'm told that the "modern" perl way to do this is AnyEvent:

http://search.cpan.org/~mgrimes/AnyEvent-Filesys-Notify-0.05...

Still backed by OS X's FSEvents, so you're not reinventing the wheel.

Ah, nice. I just mentioned the first perl fsevents google result, AnyEvent definitely looks nicer :)

I just realized that NV allows you to specify where to find/save text files (in that little drop-down I'd been ignoring!) I've since cloned my wiki repo to a location in my ~/Documents folder and pointed NV there. Looks like it's going to work.

I haven't wired this up to pull from GH yet, but it's on my todo list.

The forked build of Notational Velocity that Steve references is now quite a bit behind the official version:

http://notational.net/releasenotes/release2/#b4

Especially if you're storing your notes as separate files, syncing to Dropbox, etc., you'll want to use 2.0ß4.

I personally use the markdown preview a lot, so it's worth it to me to use nvalt, but I tend to switch back and forth between the two. Does NV offer markdown preview yet? If you're new to NV and don't care about the preview (I may be the only one who does :-) ) then consider the official build by all means.

To me, a Markdown preview is somewhat orthogonal to the process of storing and retrieving notes for personal reference, so I've been hesitant to add it so far. But if people derive value from a live Markdown-processed web page, then I can try to find a way to incorporate it without it interfering with the normal workflow.

But I would appreciate it if you could give credit by linking to the actual app from your post:

http://notational.net/

A lot of people, I understand (including myself), use Simplenote & NV to write blog post drafts, something for which Markdown is an excellent tool.

I would absolutely encourage you to add such a preview feature.

Hey, scrod, no prob. Can't believe I forgot it! One other feature I DO love is that the official NV does wiki-style [[links]] that are compatible with github's wiki markup.

Update added.

Thanks, Steve, much obliged.

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