Show HN: Note, my simple command-line note taking app

Note taking is a broad term for recording thoughts and information; the requirement is difficult to define, and fairly fluid.

We've had pens and paper since ancient times, and people are still inventing new ways of organizing their notebooks.

I think "the way" might never come.

The issue is how you define what a note even is. Some people say it’s just plain text; some demand support for images; some want to attach arbitrary files; some want rich text/markup, and some demand markdown specifically while others don’t care about the underlying format; some want simple tables, while others want full databases in their notes; some want to organize with folder and tags, while some just want tags, while some just want folders, while some want notes to live inside other notes.

With so many definitions of what a “note” is even supposed to be, it’s no surprise that we haven’t settled on a single way to create and edit them.

Granted, after centuries of written works, we still don't have "the way" to take hand written notes. Everyones brain works different, and people have total different ways to take notes.

I don't think this is 100% of the reason computers don't have a universal note taking system, but it is definitely a part of it.

"The way" is of course Notational Velocity: https://notational.net

i'm very fond of iOS/macOS Notes app. i use it heavily every day. one breakthrough for me was to stop trying to organize. i just write everything down in bulleted lists. and i create a note for each day with the date at the top, ex. 2021-2-22, which helps when scanning the list of notes. if i have something coming up that i want to prepare for i just create that note in advance, with the upcoming date at the top.

i find the search feature works well, except i have had an occasion where it stopped looking further back in time for some reason. that was actually pretty frustrating to discover.

why is it ugly? i think it looks good from the minimalist perspective. the one thing that would make me happier is if i could run it vim or have a subset of vim keybindings

Well, after over 20.000 years we don't really have a "the way" of taking notes on paper either... Note taking styles tend to be highly dependent on context and personal style...

I still think Evernote is somewhat the closest, though I agree their recent attempts at revamping the UI have left a bitter taste in people's mouths.

I don't mind the new iOS app so much UI wise, though its performance has gone to the dogs (recent issue for example was me trying to write a note in an underground car park with no signal - and it just would not load the note composer at all!)

The Windows app at least has dark mode now, though it's stuck in a weird hybrid of "classic Windows UI" versus "modern UI"

If you really want a mindblowing take on notes, try Eastgate Tinderbox. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

Sadly, they really don't do a good job explaining the program, but it hearkens back to the early days of hypertext theory.

My favorite note-taking setup is a portable version of Notepad++ saved to my Dropbox folder. Portable, auto-saving, fast, fully-searchable. So amazing.

Only problem is that I don't have a Windows computer anymore so I can't use Notepad++ anymore and I haven't seen anything come close to it on Macos.

“ ...we still don't have "the way" to take notes on computer.”

What about paper? Haha. Non standard notebook sizes. Post it, tear out, sewn-bound, spiral, 3x5, 4x6, single sided, double sided, pencil, fountain pen, roller ball, blue ink, black ink, colored pens, highlighter...

Back in the day a prof. Of mine blew my mind with the question—why do we need specialized software at all? Why not create generic app-components? Pen, compass, paper/document first? Just like real life?

My Sony DPT-RP1 gets somewhat close to that idea.

OrgMode is great, especially when you use an emacs distributions with good defaults (doom, spacemacs...)

Ummm, does anyone make somthing like that for Vi?

Asking for a friend.

Thanks for linking that.

Some noticeable differences between my script and theirs are:

1. Mine is a zero dependency ~20 line bash script.

2. Mine dates your files like YYYY-MM.txt for easy access later on and then appends to the file for a specific month.

3. Mine is designed to be used from the command line with the least amount of effort possible while giving you the most flexibility you can realistically ask for. Mine has no sub commands. You can add 1 line notes by just typing `notes hey this is my cool note` or run `notes` without arguments to open this month's notes file in your $EDITOR. It also supports taking input from stdin so you can save the output of programs or your clipboard into your notes.

There's no built in things like searching because you can grep your plain text notes at your leisure, and since the files are dated that means you can go in there and delete your notes as needed too. There's also no git integration built into the tool because your notes directory is literally a directory of plain text files. You can choose to `git init` a git repo in there if you'd like. The note tool works the same with or without it being a git repo.

This tool was created after ~20 years worth of plain text note taking. There hasn't been a commit to the project in a year because the script is basically done and works. I use it every day. There's no need to add features into it like encryption or backups because that can be handled elsewhere such as putting the notes directory into Dropbox or having a backup script reference that directory to backup (personally I rsync it with a bunch of other directories to an external HD in a daily cron job).

Thanks, it is a beautiful program. I will probably steal some ideas :)

Looks cool!

By the way, instead of alias, you can use setuptools to add it to your PATH[0].

[0] https://python-packaging.readthedocs.io/en/latest/command-li...

TiddlyWiki kind of does this. It can store binary data, but it is literally a single HTML file (or at least can be easily saved as such). I think you could just export to a single file tiddler and email that to yourself as a chron job.

For sync, I personally just use OneDrive though any other file sync service would work just as well. I use TiddlyDesktop actually and save everything as a single HTML file. TiddlyDesktop has its own backup system separate from OneDrive since it always puts the previous version into a folder before saving over it (this does need cleaning out periodically). The backup feature is actually great for resolving conflicts since the backups have unique names.

TiddlyWiki even has encryption, though I've never done it. There is a plug-in for encrypting individual tiddlers as well.

Ah thanks, you reminded me that I want to add a "dump" mode for all notes

Yes, I used my own needs but I am actively looking at similar programs, such as yours.

I am actually contemplating making the notes self-contained, with the tags and title as metadata (in the file)