Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

I believe, the quickest way to take notes on Linux and BSD and later view the notes is to use the command line.
A very easy simple way to keep record of various short notes is just to use a simple text editor like (vim) and store each note in a separate file in lets say ~/notes/ directory.
Actually, I'm using this way to take notes and store sensitive info for various important information I need for further reference, since 5 years or so..
Opening a new text editor for each note and then doing cd ~/notes/; ls |grep -i 'string' is a bit time consuming.
Fortunately there is a quick two shell functions hack that shortens time for note taking. The following two bash functions has to be added in ~/.bashrc:

n() {
vim ~/notes/"$*".txt
}
nls() {
ls -c ~/notes/ | grep "$1"
}

Copy / Paste this two functions in the beginning or the end of ~/.bashrc in order to use them.

Also if ~/notes directory is not existing, yet create it:

hipo@noah:~$ mkdir notes


To make the two new input functions active across opened bash shells on console or terminal either re-login or reread the .bashrc by "sourcing it", e.g.

hipo@noah:~$ source ~/.bashrc


Afterwards, note taking becomes a piece of cake to store a new note with login credentials (user/password) for a new registration to a random named website, type something like:

hipo@noah:~$ n my_website_name-user-pass


This will open for editting ~/.notes/my_website_name-user-pass.txt, type the new desired note content and do save and exit from vim (press esc and type !.

Then to get a quick list of all previously stored notes use:

hipo@noah:~$ nls website
my_website_name-user-pass.txt


If you already have a directory containing subdirectories with various taken notes (like me), you will need to use an improved version nls written by Jason Ryan, the nls improved is like this:

nls () { tree -CR --noreport ~/notes | awk '{
if ((NR >) gsub(/.txt/,"")); if
(NF==1) print $1; else if (NF==2)
print $2; else if (NF==3)
printf " %sn", $3}';
}


This two functions, were not my creation but was suggested in Linux Magazine issue 135 article entitled Command-line task managers and note-taking tools written by Dmitri Popov.

Hope this two functions, will be helpful to console geeks out there.

Tags: Auto, BSD, cake, consuming, copy paste, cr, Draft, file, freebsd, gnu linux, hack, important information, info, information, input functions, jason ryan, Linux, login, login credentials, mkdir, need, nls, noah, opening, password, piece, piece of cake, sensitive info, Shell, shell functions, shells, something, subdirectories, terminal, text, time, txtIf, type, vim, websitemy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 at 12:13 am and is filed under System Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.