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The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 15, 2007 4:53 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

You forgot one! You forgot about one of the simplest and easiest note-taking programs: cat!

Yes, with "cat > $somefile" you can just drop some text into a text file, and then call it up later
with "cat $somefile"! Works great, unless you forget which file something is in.

(I'm only being halfway facetious; I do in fact use cat this way.)


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The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 15, 2007 5:36 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

You forgot about one of the simplest and easiest note-taking programs: cat!

He did mention that he was restricting the field to graphical apps. It would be hard to argue that cat falls into that category (so to speak). ;-)

FWIW, I have at least one xterm with a "vi /tmp/foo" open at all times; it becomes a dumping ground for almost anything of interest, from long (but useful) command lines to geek stuff on sale to "to do" lists to URLs to scorekeeping to code snippets to ... (And if I changed it to gvim, it would even count as graphical...)

Greg

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 15, 2007 14:46 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It seems odd to keep your notes in /tmp.

(Myself I use a directory full of tiny files, and Emacs dired. Maybe I should use remember.el instead...)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 15, 2007 17:16 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

It seems odd to keep your notes in /tmp.

Well, obviously (or not?) I don't do that on multiuser machines. But on single-user machines, I find "/tmp" is a tiny bit easier to type than "~", and like many programmers, I optimize for ease of use (i.e., I'm lazy :-) ).

Greg

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 20, 2007 20:45 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

So these are very-short-term scribbles that aren't meant to survive a
reboot?

(Myself I use unsaved buffers in XEmacs for that. Why not just open a file
in emacs or vi and don't save it? ;) )

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 24, 2007 16:53 UTC (Sat) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

So these are very-short-term scribbles that aren't meant to survive a reboot?

No, they're both short- and long-term. The short-term ones I delete after I'm done with them; the long-term ones accumulate. /tmp doesn't get wiped on my systems; that's an optional setting, and one I don't need.

Greg

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 25, 2007 22:10 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Aha, that makes sense. I'd almost forgotten that systems could exist in
which /tmp was not a tmpfs... :)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted May 29, 2007 0:09 UTC (Tue) by tqk (guest, #29605) [Link]

> > You forgot about one of the simplest and easiest note-taking programs: cat!
>
> He did mention that he was restricting the field to graphical apps. It would be hard to argue that cat falls into that category (so to speak). ;-)

Port it to perl, and toss in perl::Tk? Here's what I use:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# ~/devl/perl/things.pl replaces ~/sh/things.sh; datestamps,
# separates, and pretty-prints entries.
#

use strict;
use warnings;

my $outfile = qq($ENV{HOME}/dox/things_to_remember.html);
my $now;
chomp( $now = qx(date) );

open( THINGS, ">> $outfile" ) ||
die qq($0: could not open $outfile for append: $!);

print THINGS q( <li> ) . $now . q(<br>) . "\n";
print THINGS q( <pre>) . "\n";

while( <STDIN> ) {
s/\</&lt;/g;
s/\>/&gt;/g;
print THINGS;
}

print THINGS q( </pre>) . "\n\n";
close( THINGS );

__END__

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 15, 2007 9:20 UTC (Thu) by macc (subscriber, #510) [Link]

OK you've got the cat by the tail
and how do you organise this?

Imho the core requirement is that all information has
to go through one chanel.

For a couple of years i have used my eMail client
for taking notes.
Anything noteworthy gets written into an email to
myself. Changes updates go as replies to myself.
It is easy to annotate received eMails and if you
are traveling send an SMS to your eMail account.

Everything in one place.

G!
macc

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 15, 2007 10:31 UTC (Thu) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link]

I have an alias 'b' which expands to "vim -c 'set paste' $HOME/someplace/FILE". Making a note either by typing or pasting is a one-second affair. The file is searchable and greppable, and by now a treasure-log spanning a few years, measuring just over 200K. And I guess I don't travel that much.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 15, 2007 14:48 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

See also gnus's nntodo.el and nndiary.el backends (for keeping todo lists and timed-expiry diaries, respectively).

Obviously both support searching, filtering and so on, persistently via nnkiboze and nnvirtual groups, and nonpersistently (but this support comes for free from Gnus itself).

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 16, 2007 21:13 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Works great, unless you forget which file something is in.
There is a fix for that:

$ set -o noclobber
$ echo "Buy Kleenex" >todo
$ echo "Call Lisa" >todo
bash: todo: cannot overwrite existing file

Better yet, use a real editor and a real file manager.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 17, 2007 10:45 UTC (Sat) by csawtell (subscriber, #986) [Link]

That's exactly how I store the phone number list.
Putting an entry in the list is simply:
echo 'Joe Blow 987-6543' >> ~/PhoneNumbers

Looking up a number is equally simple:
grep -i joe ~/PhoneNumbers

For me it's far simpler and quicker than fiddling about with one of the the Kbloatware solutions.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications

Posted Feb 20, 2007 18:00 UTC (Tue) by alvherre (subscriber, #18730) [Link]

I used to do that, but eventually found hnb which allowed to add a bit more structure to the thing. hnb is great for keeping semi-structured stuff in a curses interface. Sadly development seems to have stopped.

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