Show HN: Paper – A Journaling CLI for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Paper – A Journaling CLI for Developers

paper.rewrlution.com

12 pointsdmsehuang15 comments

Great project. Any plans to let users point the CLI directly to an existing Obsidian vault for the markdown files?

Hey cadeos,

Yes, `paper import` handles this. just point it at the folder your daily notes live in:

``` paper import <your-path-to-journals> --dry-run ```

Comment: 1. I personally keep all my Obsidian journals in a journal folder, so that's easy for me to do 2. highly recommend you to use the `--dry-run` option if you are not sure what files will be imported

Two things worth knowing. 1. It reads every `.md` and `.txt` inside that folder 2. file with no date in its name is still imported, and last modified date will become its filename in "paper".

You can read more about its logic in the "Importing existing notes" section on the npm page: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@rewrlution/paper-cli

Hope it works and hope you will enjoy it!

Oh wait, I think I misunderstood your question!

You can use ‘paper config’ to specify the working directory, then all the journals will be saved to that path.

If people want an open source version of this, jrnl is great.

https://github.com/jrnl-org/jrnl

Oh wow, that's a very popular one! I did not know that before. I am gonna give it a try and compare these tools. Thanks for the info!

I've been looking for something like this for a while. Thank you!

Hey level87, hope you will enjoy it and let us know if you run into any issues or have any feature requests!

We are all ears!

Is it open source? What is the repository?

Hello llagerlof, nope, it is not open source.

Here's the link to the npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@rewrlution/paper-cli

Am I missing something? How is it not open source if I can view the source code at that link?

haha, you got it!

I published the CLI tool with the sourcemap enabled prev-v1.0.0

That's why you can see the source code.

Do you have any plans to make it open source in the future?

The tldr is yes, but not sure about which part will be open source and which part will remain private, and when.

The API & web app components will definitely remain private, but the CLI tool itself can be open source.

If you run ‘paper config’ today, you will still see that you can configure the “sync url” - basically that allows you to sync your content to your own hosting provider.

I spent non-trivial thought on this topic during development, but then ended up with a conclusion that I should just make it private for now to speed up feature development. Otherwise I would need to think really hard on the interface & contract design.

Wow! now i dont have to switch beetween onenote and terminal for my notes!

Hey sankaran458, I am so glad to see this comment, and I hope this CLI tool can truly do its work to save people’s pain points. I hope this is not “yet another” useless tool that tries to simplify the workflow.

Give it a try and let me know your feedback if there’s any!

Hope you will enjoy it!

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