Posted on 2022-03-25
Approximately one month ago I started taking notes on what is happening around me, what I am doing and similar things. Until now I have used wiki.vim, which was great, but I noticed I was not using many of its features, and always had a very similar style of writing that could be automated.
That is why I decided to create my own note taking CLI, ntd (speak: noted). My application utilizes bots, basically very simple applications transforming the note and doing other things with it, to be very powerful. By default, with no bots activated, is just prints out what is given to the application, not even storing it. That is where bots come in. They are just called using @bot somewhere in the note, take what is after the call as a argument and may change this part, share data with other bots, even call other bots.
The bot @note is a prime example for a bot. It is a combination of many other bots, writing the note to a file, storing references to the note when given tags (annotated as #). The best part of bots is probably how easy they are to write. They are basically just executable files stored in a directory, written in any programming language. They take the arguments as standard input and give back results as standard output.
I do not know for how long I am going to keep taking such notes, or whether I will do it for the rest of my life. At least I now have a nice note taking application. The source code can be found on GitLab and sourcehut: