Being more organized with notes

I’ve been taking notes for a little while now using Sublime and a tiny Thor command line tool. The code for it is:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'thor'
require 'date'

PATH = '~/notes'
FOLDERS = %w(scratch thoughts work)

class Note < Thor
  FOLDERS.each do |type|
    desc "#{type} [NAME]", "Create a new #{type} note"
    define_method(type) do |file|
      td = Date.today.to_s.split('-').join
      file = "#{td}-#{file}"
      %x(touch #{PATH}/#{__method__}/#{file}.md)
      %x(subl #{PATH}/#{__method__}/#{file}.md)
    end
  end

  desc 'open [TYPE]', 'Open a specific notes directory'
  def open(type)
    %x(subl #{PATH}/#{type})
  end

  desc 'edit', 'Edit the notes CLT'
  def edit
    %x(subl #{File.expand_path(__FILE__)})
  end

  desc 'search [TYPE] [q]', 'Search a directory'
  def search(type, q)
    puts %x(ack #{q} #{PATH}/#{type})
  end
end

Note.start

To use it, save the file somewhere. Let’s say you save it in ~/Code/note.thor:

1. Get thor: gem install thor
2. Change FOLDERS if need be and create the needed directories. For me, that looks like

   /Users/williamgoldstein/notes
   ├── blog
   ├── scratch
   ├── thoughts
   └── work
   

You can make these with e.g. mkdir -p ~/Notes/work

1. Create a handy alias. In my bash profile I have alias notes='~/Code/notes.thor.
2. Run it: notes

   $  notes
   Commands:
     notes.thor edit             # Edit the notes CLT
     notes.thor help [COMMAND]   # Describe available commands or one specific command
     notes.thor open [TYPE]      # Open a specific notes directory
     notes.thor scratch [NAME]   # create a new scratch note
     notes.thor thoughts [NAME]  # create a new thoughts note
     notes.thor work [NAME]      # create a new work note
   

• notes edit is a quick way to iterate on the tool itself
• notes work hello will open a new timestamped file like 20160308-hello.md in Sublime.