One thing that I really miss while I’m using Crunchbang is a good note-taking app with plain text support. I haven’t found one yet so I threw together a few simple bash scripts that I can use in the terminal for easier notetaking.

function no() {
  geany ~/Dropbox/path/to/notes/$1.txt
}

function nos() {
  ls -c ~/Dropbox/path/to/notes | grep --color=always $1
}

function nol() {
  ls -c ~/Dropbox/path/to/notes
}

function not() {
  cat ~/Dropbox/path/to/notes/$1.txt
}

The no() function will open the note itself in the text editor Geany. The nos() function is used for finding notes with a particular search term in their filename. The --color=always highlights the given search term. The -c sort all of the notes by the last modified date. The nol() function just lists all of the notes and the not() function displays the content of a note directly in the terminal. Now I just need to type either $ no filename, $ nos search-term, $ nol or $ not filename to do various things to my notes.

I also added two scripts for appending text directly into my spark file and todo file which I then use like this: $ add Write something about anything and $ todo Something soon.

function add() {
  echo $@ >> ~/Dropbox/path/to/notes/spark-file.txt
}

function todo() {
  echo $@ >> ~/Dropbox/path/to/notes/todo.txt
}

Even though the scripts aren’t as useful as a fully featured app they provide some sort of functionality to my writing workflow, which is nice.