This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.
I am a compulsive note-taker. In my work I often find I want to take notes that are contextual to a project or other shared directory, but I don't want to pollute the shared environment with my private thoughts. Thus I'm in the habbit of recording notes elsewhere with sloppy/inconsistent/unsearchable references to the original directories they're relevant to.
nh is a simple utility - a single bash script - that simply provides a wrapper around my text editor to record bits of metadata including the PWD where the note was authored and a simple tagging feature. But both the note content and the metadata are stored in their own directory structure which, additionally, can be automatically synced to a private github repo for use across different devices.
Notes are presented in .md format just for nice syntax highlighting - I've
been storing my notes as .md for years so this feels natural to me. This too
is the reason for the metadata key/value formatting.
It also served as a good project to nudge my bash scripting forward with a few patterns I intend to repeat elsewhere.
It's not exactly feature-complete, and any weird shenanigans with the underlying git repo will likely require some manual intervention, but from my perspective this is acceptable.
This is entirely a personal project and I may extend or change or otherwise break it…
The file nh in the root of the repo is the only required file for full operation. As such the easiest way to install the latest version is:
cd ~/somewhere/in/your/path # e.g. ~/bin
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scpso/nh/main/nh >nh
chmod 744 nh
You can verify it's working correctly with:
nh --version
Before you can start storing notes you'll need to initialise a repo. For just trying nh out a local repo is best:
nh --new-lrepo
nh will read the $EDITOR environment variable to choose a text editor to run, falling back to nano if $EDITOR is not set. It's not required, but if you want to you can set this permanently (with, for example, vim as your preferred editor):
printf 'EDITOR=vim\nexport EDITOR\n' >>~/.bashrc
To write a new note, just run nh with no other commands:
nh
To list existing notes:
nh --list --all
to edit an existing note, you can specify it with the first few characters of the note's id or its title (both of which are displayed by the --list command:
nh --edit mynote
Check the help for more commands:
nh --help