Show HN: Command-line-first app for capturing notes and reflections in Markdown | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Command-line-first app for capturing notes and reflections in Markdown

github.com

28 pointsdev_by_day9 comments

WTF? taskwarrior, bullet-journal and beeminder, all-in-one from command-line :fire! It's all I wanted/needed but was afraid of building myself... Awesome!

Thanks for sharing. I'm going to give this a try and add an edit later on.

before that, my reasons for this (and against paper notes):

- I'm often without my physical notebook (moving around. remote work, et c)

- searchability

- so, so many copied links. with physical, I'd have to make a note, book mark in my browser, sort it, and then repeat on retrieval.

- I always have a terminal open on every screen, so this should hopefully always be right there for me

- automation of timestamping

(Guess I can't edit a day later)

(1) the doc generation is nice, but without sending me straight into an editor, it just didn't beat a workflow of me creating a new .md in vs code or sublime et c.

(2) please, please, add a clear uninstall block to your README. I love trying out new stuff like this, but also need a good way of removing it (in fact, I often won't try stuff out if it doesn't have a clear uninstall route)

I don't know man. I'm old school with notes. I've tried to use many things and keep coming back to good ol' notebook and pencil.

I optimize for time-to-write from thought. Opening software and waiting it to load is slow. For me, writing a bunch of cli commands and arguments to take a note is even worse.

Notebook has no latency.

It has tons of sensible defaults so you don't really need to pipe in any arguments unless you want to. All one merely needs to do is type "devlog" and you get a newly generated markdown file that is timestamped and ready to be filled out.

Some people like hand written notes and thats ok as well, the user feedback I got was they're not very portable and are hard to search through and share. Keeping note files in markdown makes it easier to store in a repository or shared file service for easy backup, querying and sharing.

I really don't get it, one can simply open a README.md or TODO.md and litteraly do the same thing - taking notes - without installing anything.

You certainly can, the point of this tool is to automate some of the workflow around managing notes as markdown files. With devlog you get:

- custom templates for three different common document types(todo, notes and development logs) that you can pre-populate with whatever format you want. Populating it with questions has been useful for some of my users who use it as a way to quickly reflect on what they've been doing.

- automatically timestamps the document so you know when the document was written and it makes sorting through notes easier.

- tagging: this makes grouping and searching for documents much easier

- configuration: from any directory in your OS you can type a single command "devlog" and have a new document generated to a directory you want.

It's written in golang and incredibly lightweight as well so the "installation burden"is very low.

> - tagging: this makes grouping and searching for documents much easier

Does tagging syntax target some form of static site generator? It would be cool if was configurable for Hugo, Jekyll and others.

I'm all good about the single binary for installation and I understand the concept better now for achieving the same level of documentation in any project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com