Memo: Open-source note-taking software with hack value | Hacker News Reader

Memo: Open-source note-taking software with hack value

getmemo.org

55 pointsunixguy11 comments

I keep a list in a text file, often kept open in vim. I don't know that this improves the workflow of that, though it might provide some organizational benefits for a large list, maybe?

That said, it's always nice to see new simple command line utilities, and it's amusing to see that now ideas are moving from the web to the command line, instead of the reverse (kinda; but it seems like todo list apps are a thing that became hugely popular with web frameworks; org-mode has existed for a long time, and I remember a clever awk-based note taking app a few years ago, that I never ended up making use of because it was something new to learn, but there have been like a million todo list apps on the web). For years, there was a truism that the secret to success on the web was to pick some popular UNIX service and make a web version of it.

If it were somehow integrated with bash completion, instead of using IDs, I might think more seriously about it. i.e.:

    memo -d "Fix log<tab>"

Which completes to the memo named "Fix log file rotation problem on srv1", for example. Having to list the items, find the ID of the one I want (I currently have about 60 items in my notes file, and while regex search makes it easier, it's still a multi-step process that's slower and more tedious than /Fix log<enter>dd in vim. Tab completion would make it one step in memo.

I'm the author of Memo.

First of all it's nice to see Memo here in Hacker News. Memo started simply because I wanted note taking program for the command line. I never thought that it will become fairly popular as it is now.

Your bash completion is actually a great idea. I will start implementing it in the near future. It shouldn't be too hard to do and it will Memo much more nice to use. Thanks!

Wow, talk about perfect timing!

I've been thinking of writing a cross-platform desktop-app for a while but lately I realized that there are only 2 stable cross-platform UI: CLI and HTML/CSS/JS. Because of that, I'm planning to spend a year using FreeBSD and to limit myself only to use CLI tools, Emacs, and Chrome (I definitely will limit the usage of Chrome as well).

I wanted to test the idea of "Focus" by eliminating distraction.

I noticed a few patterns of NIX tools: .<something>rc for personal configuration, .<something> (folder) for local data, and a few other things that I forgot. Can anyone recommend books/references for writing classic NIX tools? (C, best practices, effective-java-like book, POSIX compliant, utilizing build tools, x86/x64, etc).

This book is pretty nice and interesting. Written by Eric Raymond. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/

Reminds me of todo.txt, a rather popular and similar CLI for task management storing the todos in a plain text file as well - see http://todotxt.com/. It has been around since 2009, with source code at https://github.com/ginatrapani/todo.txt-cli.

Todo.txt also has iOS and Android apps, possibly connecting to a shared task file in a Dropbox.

Some use cases are todo tasks but I think devtodo is much better for that. The default options are not harder than memo's but it's more featureful for todo managing (priorities, tree like todos).

It's still useful for really, memos, for things that are already done on a given date.

Hmm, what's the hack value? Org-mode(http://orgmode.org/) pretty sure will beat this.

Well its C so you do not need an whole operating system to use it(emacs). Also why the bashing? The author of this program has made something that is useful and that is a concrete project, its not an blog post about making a todo list in node.js.

Does this use the todo.txt standard format?

Uh, No. It has a different format. Described here: http://www.getmemo.org/dev.html

Really cool! What about Google Tasks integration?

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