✍ Keeping Notes My Plain Text Journey Part V

This is an ongoing series:

• 📃 My journey into the plain text life - Intro
• 🛠️ Tools for working with plain text files - My Plain Text Journey Part II
• 🗃️ Syncing my notes - My Plain Text Journey Part III
• 📝 Journaling - My Plain Text Journey Part IV
• ✍ Keeping Notes My Plain Text Journey Part V
• ✔ Tasks and To Dos My Plain Text Journey Part VI

My notes are not fancy

This article can be condensed to “all of my notes are in my Notes folder”. Well, that isn’t quite correct, I do keep a Projects folder for notes that have a project in common.

All of my notes are in Markdown format. Plain Jane, vanilla markdown. It does everything that I need, and nothing more. I also don’t have pictures or drawings in my notes. You could add them, but since git doesn’t really like binary files and I store my notes in git, I try to limit the amount of binary files I’ve added.

My notes/Notes folder

If you’ve been following along with my plain text journey, you know that I keep everything in a folder unsurprisingly named notes. So, to make things confusing, I put my plain text notes into a Notes folder. Note the capital N. This folder contains files for each note that I take. Every 6 months to a year, I go in and archive notes that aren’t relevant anymore.

Each note is a separate file in Notes for the most part. I do have some notes such as ideas.md in which I list different ideas. There is also a tips.md file where I keep track of all sorts of cli/app/program tips. This file is a life saver, before I would have to Google each time I needed to do something I couldn’t remember.

Creating a note

I use the following script named nn to create a note:

#!/bin/bash

## New Drafts
## Modified from GozNote
## Quickly create notes from the commandline or something like Alfred

if [$# -eq 0]; then
    echo "NewNote v.02"
    echo "Enter the name of the note as the argument"
    exit
fi

TITLE="$@"
AUTHOR="`whoami`"
DATE=`date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"`

# Parameters for Vim to jump to the bottom of the file 
# and start in Insert mode
EDITOR="vim + +startinsert"
DEFAULTFOLDER="."
EXT="md"

# I originally prepended the date, but now I don't.
#PREPEND="`date +%Y-%m-%d`-"
PREPEND=""
SLUG=$(echo -n "${TITLE}" | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z)

#If the title begins with a 2, assume that it's a date 
#and set the title to everything after the first 11 characters.
if [["${TITLE:0:1}" == "2"]]; then TITLE=${TITLE:11}; fi

if [[! -f ${DEFAULTFOLDER}/${PREPEND}${SLUG}.${EXT}]]; then
    echo -e "---\nTitle: ${TITLE}\nAuthor: ${AUTHOR}\nDate: ${DATE}\nSlug: ${SLUG}\nCategory: \nTags:\nStatus: draft\n---\n\n" > "${DEFAULTFOLDER}/${PREPEND}${SLUG}.${EXT}"
fi

${EDITOR} "${DEFAULTFOLDER}/${PREPEND}${SLUG}.${EXT}"

Originally, I was setting the default folder in the script so I could create a note at the command line from anywhere, but I’ve switched it to making the note in the current folder. I run the script with the name of the note as the parameters: nn Indepth review of the Atari Computer. The script creates a slug for a file name based on the name of the note and adds some frontmatter to the note. After running that command I could get a note named indepth-review-of-the-atari-computer.md that looks like this:

--------
Title: Indepth review of the Atari Computer
Author: goz
date: 2021-06-11T08:21:00-04:00
Slug: indepth-review-of-the-atari-computer
Category:
Tags:
--------

Mobile

On my iPhone I created a Shortcut that mimics my new note script. Once the note is created, I can open and edit it in iA Writer. Under Android, I do everything under Termux, so it works the same as if I was on my Linux box.

Finding and linking notes

I don’t bother with linking between notes or dealing with searches. The default OS searches work well, or a simple grep can be used to find a particular note.

Managing and archiving Notes folder

Every so often I go through my Notes folder and move things to an Archive. In notes/Archive I have a folder for each year, and I’ll move notes I no longer need into the archive folder of the year the note was created. There may be hundreds of notes, but I don’t really care. I can grep or search for old notes that I may need.

Works on my system

This works well for me. I can create or access my notes from any platform. What do you think?