I was an Obsidian user for some time and I still dig it, but it was too much for my needs. Additionally, the fact that it’s a GUI program did not jive well with my desire to move my workflow to the mighty Command Line.
There are only two functionalities I need:
- Creating a note at a destination
- Searching in notes
And do this with markdown files because there is nothing better on Earth if you are not a print editor.
Markdown
At primary school, we were hard into editing Word documents, and the main dogma of this process was the following: Children, first type the raw text, then format it!
This causes two problems: the context of the text is only changeable in the dedicated editor. Changing the formatted text with raw text and formatting it again is just a nuisance.
The reason I love markdown is that the text and its context are in one place, and rendering it is decoupled from the file itself. You can render it as html, convert it into pdf, or just use a viewer/editor you like, but most importantly, you can edit it with any editor that can open a text file.
I kept the most important reason for last: It is dead simple (like me).
Note management
So I technically can provide myself with the two functionalities using GNU utilities in the CLI like a komputer scientist, and I did that, but this needed to be more convenient. So I made an (accidentally) hundred-line shell script solving this “problem”.
If you want to check it out I won’t stop you: https://github.com/hrvthzslt/mnm
You will find all the information that you need about its usage.
Go to Shell
The more important thing is I did this because I wanted to do some good old POSIX compliant shell scripting like the cool kids (or like not cool old people, same thing). I chose shell because it has the most universal compatibility. Then I used fzf and rg, so I made requirements that won’t be available on all machines; they are not core utils… Did I make a mistake? Yes.
The primary knowledge source I used is: https://www.shellscript.sh/ . It’s a beautiful site; I highly recommend it if you’re interested in this topic.
And my mentor was https://www.shellcheck.net/
, a static analysis tool for (prepare yourself) shell scripts. It throws you error codes similar to SC2086 like there is no tomorrow. It’s a really great time, as long as you like to suffer. Most of the time, I had to check the wiki to understand what the problem was. At least it has really good examples.
You shall not pass
Since I made a serious software, it needs a serious pipeline. Yes, you guessed it, I made a GitHub action for one sh file.
It runs shellcheck, which is great; that is a neat protection, but there are more important concerns…
If you recall, I said this script turned out to be one hundred lines long, so:
[ $(wc -l < mnm.sh) -eq 100 ] && exit 0 || exit 1
Oh, and I used act for testing GitHub actions locally. It’s one of the greatest tools in the world. You’re welcome!