Organization

Take notes from your (Linux) terminal! It works, if you treat each note file as an item in your inbox. I trade readable file names for tagging within each file, and speed in creating new notes.

I created the directory ~/docs/ for these notes. Here are the scripts, though I no longer use them religiously.

timestamp

Print the current date and time without spaces. This is used later.

#!/bin/sh
date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S

note

This creates a new note and starts editing it with VIM.

#!/bin/sh
vim ~/docs/`timestamp`

nedit

To find notes before you've had a chance to copy them to someplace better, use this script. It takes keywords (passed to grep) as arguments, though you can enter more once the program is running to narrow your search. When there is one result, or you type "XX)" (where XX is the index of one of the results), the corresponding note is opened by the editor in your EDITOR environment variable, or VIM when you haven't set it.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

editor = ENV['editor'] || "vim"

Dir.chdir("/home/tom/docs")

def find_by_keywords(keywords=[],files=nil)
  final ||= Dir["????-??-??_??-??-??"]
  keywords.each do |arg|
    final_copy = final
    final = []
    `grep -il #{arg} *`.each_line do |line|
      final << line.chomp if final_copy.include? line.chomp
    end
  end
  final
end

keywords = ARGV
results = find_by_keywords(keywords)
while results.length > 1
  puts "Found #{results.length} results:"
  puts

  results.each_index do |i|
    puts "=================="
    puts "#{i}) #{results[i]}"
    `head -n 7 #{results[i]}`.each_line do |line|
      puts ">  " + line
    end
    puts "=================="
    puts
  end

  puts "New keywords? "
  input = $stdin.gets
  if input =~ /^[0-9]+\)$/
    results = [results[input.to_i]]
  else
    keywords = keywords | input.split
    results = find_by_keywords(keywords,results)
  end
end

puts "Found #{results.length} results"
system "vim #{results.first}" if results.length > 0

Posted Mar 14, 2007, in the morning.

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