notes

Motivation

I love taking notes. Its always good to have some place to write things down.

So I wrote a short bash function to open a new textfile with the current date as filename (or with a specified name) and open it in my $EDITOR.

I added this function to my zshrc. And whenever I need to write something down, I just type notes into my terminal and start writing (in markdown).

Usecase

Of course, it could get really hard to find specific informations after a while. This is not a “wiki” solution or replace tools like obsidian.

I use it for different purposes, like a daily todo - or i prepare emails or other messages

The function

function notes(){
  local notedir="$HOME/notes"
  mkdir -p $notedir

  
  if [ "$1" = "-y" ]; then
    local filename="$(date -d "yesterday" +%Y-%m-%d).md"
  elif [ -z "$1" ]; then
    local filename="$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md"
  else
    local filename="$1.md"
  fi
  filename="$notedir/$filename"

  if [ ! -f $filename ]; then
    echo "# $(date +%Y-%m-%d)" >> $filename
  fi

  # Open File with $EDITOR if set
  if [ -z $EDITOR ]; then
    vim $filename
  else
    $EDITOR $filename
  fi
}