notable-cli
Simple to use jekyll-markdown parsing note-taking app for the command line and your favorite editor and Unix tools.
Package is still in development and testing. There may be breaking changes.
Features
- Create, edit, manage and search text-based notes using markdown Read from a single flexible storage directory, search, filter and list notes
- List tags
- Use your standard v
- avorite $EDITOR to edit notes
- compatible with "notes" created with notable or notes-cli
Installation
npm install -g notable-cli
Or use it directly using npx:
npx notable-cli
Please note that all examples in this README.md assume that you have installed notable-cli globally. If not, just replace the notable-cli call with npx notable-cli and you’re fine.
Configuration
The cli searches for not-hidden markdown files ending with .md in the notebooks home directory which must be set in the environment variable: NOTABLE_CLI_HOME.
You can set this by exporting it or setting it in your .bash_profile:
export NOTABLE_CLI_HOME=~/Notes
If NOTABLE_CLI_HOME isn’t defined, it checks for NOTES_CLI_HOME or NOTES_CLI_HOME.
Usage
Notes
Listing all notes in column output with creation data, title and tags:
notable-cli list --oneline
Search
You can search in tags, title and content of all notes with a regular expression syntax when using the first argument "query". Just imagine you’re searching your notes which contain "Meeting":
notable-cli list Meeting
You can also be more specific when you know that you’re searching for a specific tag:
notable-cli list --tag Meeting
Searching by a specific date just needs to enter the date in YYYYMMDD format:
notable-cli list 20191011
If you enter multiple words all parts of the query must match. The following query will only return notes if all words are somewhere inside the note’s content, title or filename:
notable-cli list "project customer standup"
Sorting
The list can be sorted using the --sort parameter. So you can open your last created note:
notable-cli list --sort created | tail -n 1 | xargs $EDITOR
Open
Notes can be opened by piping the output of notable-cli list to your favorite editor or by using the --editor option which opens the editor.
notable-cli list | xargs $EDITOR
Same thing can be archived by:
notable-cli list --editor
Create PDF from a note using md-to-pdf
notable-cli my-search-term | head -n 1 | xargs cat | md-to-pdf
Text-Based User Interface (TUI)
The interactive text-mode interface is a neo-blessed powered interactive CLI interface that allows you to list all the notes, tags and creation/modified dates while entering a search query on top and previewing the notes as soon as there’s one selected in the list:
notable-cli --interactive
It can also get combined with other arguments like searching or filtering by tags:
notable-cli --tags Project/IKEA --interactive
Panes
There are 3 panes, search input, list of notes and a note-preview which shows the currently selected note:
┌─Search──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Notable │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌──Notes (1)────────┬──────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Title │ Tags │ Created ⬆ / Age │
│ Notable-Cli Ideas │ Ideas, Note, Project/Notable-CLI │ 2019-11-04 07:56 / 6 │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
└───────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌──/Users/ephigenia/Google Drive File Stream/Meine Ablage/Notable/notes/Notable-Cli Ideas.md──────┐
│ │
│ # Notable-Cli Ideas │
│ │
│ ### Roadmap │
│ │
│ ## Questions / Problems │
│ │
│ * when and how to update modified date │
│ │
│ ## Later Versions │
│ │
│ * tag batch editing / removing / adding / renaming │
│ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Key-Bindings
- tab or shifttab - focus on the next or previous pane
- r - reload data from a directory
- f - focus on text input search for fast searching notes
- o - open the currently selected note in the editor
- q, esc, ctrlc - quit the application
- s or S - switch to the next or previous sorting direction
- C-e or C-y - scroll top, scroll bottom
- C+f or C-g - scroll page down or up
Full output
When using --full is used all query matching notes will be shown with their full content.
notable-cli list --full
Use less for paging through the output:
notable-cli list Standup --full | less
Tags
List all tags
notable-cli tags
New Notes
Creating new notes accepts the title of the note as the first argument and tags as CSV list as the second argument. It will create a file using the title which renders a template that contains a list of template variables.
notable-cli new YYYYMMDD-Standup Project/MyProject,Standup,Note
This will create and emmidiently open a new note with the current date + "-Standup" as the title using the Tags "Project/MyProject", "Standup" and "Note".
New Notes in Sub-Directories
When the title of the note contains slashes it will be saved in a sub-directory of the home directory.
notable-cli new Project/Open-Source/YYYYMMDD-Note
Will create a new file in the "Project/Open-Source/" directory. If that directory doesn’t exist it will get created. Also, each directory is added as the tag of the newly created file so you don’t have to add them as tags.
Templates
You can pipe in a file’s content or the template string directly to notable-cli new to get it used as a template. The content will be handled as handlebars template.
Using a template:
cat templates/daily.template.md | notable-cli new YYYYMMDD-Note
Using a template string
echo "my new note created by {{username}}" | notable-cli new YYYYMMDD-Note
Template variables
| name | value |
|---|---|
{{created}} |
ISO string when the file was created |
{{modified}} |
ISO string when the file was modified |
{{tags}} |
csv list of tags |
{{title}} |
title of the file |
{{username}} |
current username |
There’s also a "format" helper which can be used to add formatted english dates. F.e. if you use {{ format created 'YYYY-MM-DD' }} then it will add this date string at the position in the template.
Other Projects
List of other, alternate or compatible, inspiring projects that use similar markdown syntax or features.