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notesbash: A notes management TUI written in Bash

Hey there!

notesbash, the note-taking program running in the terminal written in bash is about to have it first stable release. Before we release it, we would be happy to receive feedback and suggestions for improvement from anyone interested! Either here as a comment under this post or preferably as issues on Codeberg.

https://codeberg.org/lukeflo/notesbash

notesbash started out as a fork of the filemanager fff.

Features of notesbash as of version v0.6.3:

- File management à la fff

- powerful template system for creating notes

- recursive search using fzf if available

- tagging of notes using keywords

- filtering notes based on those keywords (basically recursive search using tags)

- notes management for notes concerning publications in .bib files (bibnotes)

- more is on the way!

Posted in: s/bash

🚀 klimperfix

Jul 05 · 4 days ago · 👍 gritty, stack, blah_blah_blah, Dio9sys

4 Comments ↓

🍭 Dio9sys · Jul 07 at 16:02:

Super impressive stuff! I'm about to go do things IRL but I'll check this oit tonight and post my thoughts

🚀 blah_blah_blah · Jul 07 at 21:18:

It's nice. I couldn't get it to open a commandline editor, though. Kept opening my GUI editor, which wasn't convenient. Tinkered with the config file, but it didn't seem to help. Would actually prefer that a new note simply take input from the keyboard directly (via `read`). Why open anything at all? Already saved notes could open in an editor, since this means changing the note. It's an interesting beginning.

🍭 Dio9sys · Jul 07 at 22:39:

It's neat! It's a little rough when it comes to needing to set environment variables and a config file to use it, and I agree with blah_blah_blah that it could be good to use the built-in read function rather than defaulting to either a visual editor or vi, but it's super cool to see something like this in bash

🚀 klimperfix [OP] · Jul 08 at 07:14:

Thanks for your feedback!

So you think notesbash should use the `read' bash builtin for initial content instead of opening an editor for it? That's an interesting idea, which we could implement in two ways:

1. we plan to implement a shortcut to create a new note instantly (something like quicknotes). We could use `read` for this feature to fill the note with initial content.

2. a config setting where you can choose to have notesbash use `read` when creating a note, and then the editor when editing.

The problem with `read` is that it is quite limited compared to a dedicated editor.

notesbash is also used for writing scientific papers and longer texts. Furthermore, I don't know if this feature adds unnecessary complexity to notesbash, since notesbash is primarily supposed to manage the notes, not edit/write them...

UPDATE: I have discussed this with @lukeflo, we decided against it for the reason just mentioned. notesbash is mainly for managing the notes, editing is done by the editor. In his opinion, such a read option is rather something for real interactive CLI programs and is rather unnecessary for TUIs, and I agree with him. Besides, this approach also follows more the UNIX philosophy, where a program should do one thing, and do it well!

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@blah_blah_blah Have you set the `NOTESBASH_EDITOR` option for your editor in the notesbash config? (e.g. for Helix: `NOTESBASH_EDITOR=(hx)`) In addition, the

variable `NOTESBASH_GUI_EDITOR` must not be `1` or `true` (If you did not change anything in this variable it should work, by default it is set to `false`).

If it still does not work, please let me know!

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@Dio9sys you only have to use one option... You can either configure notesbash

via the configuration file, or alternatively use the environment variables!

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I'm looking forward to your answers!

Regards, Klimperfix