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I believe, the quickest way to take notes on Linux and BSD and later view the notes is to use the command line.
A very easy simple way to keep record of various short notes is just to use a simple text editor like (vim) and store each note in a separate file in lets say ~/notes/ directory.
Actually, I'm using this way to take notes and store sensitive info for various important information I need for further reference, since 5 years or so..
Opening a new text editor for each note and then doing cd ~/notes/; ls |grep -i 'string' is a bit time consuming.
Fortunately there is a quick two shell functions hack that shortens time for note taking. The following two bash functions has to be added in ~/.bashrc:

n() {
vim ~/notes/"$*".txt
}
nls() {
ls -c ~/notes/ | grep "$1"
}

Copy / Paste this two functions in the beginning or the end of ~/.bashrc in order to use them.

Also if ~/notes directory is not existing, yet create it:

hipo@noah:~$ mkdir notes

To make the two new input functions active across opened bash shells on console or terminal either re-login or reread the .bashrc by "sourcing it", e.g.

hipo@noah:~$ source ~/.bashrc

Afterwards, note taking becomes a piece of cake to store a new note with login credentials (user/password) for a new registration to a random named website, type something like:

hipo@noah:~$ n my_website_name-user-pass

This will open for editting ~/.notes/my_website_name-user-pass.txt, type the new desired note content and do save and exit from vim (press esc and type :x!.

Then to get a quick list of all previously stored notes use:

hipo@noah:~$ nls website
my_website_name-user-pass.txt

If you already have a directory containing subdirectories with various taken notes (like me), you will need to use an improved version nls written by Jason Ryan, the nls improved is like this:

nls () { tree -CR --noreport ~/notes | awk '{
if ((NR >) gsub(/.txt/,"")); if
(NF==1) print $1; else if (NF==2)
print $2; else if (NF==3)
printf " %sn", $3}';
}

This two functions, were not my creation but was suggested in Linux Magazine issue 135 article entitled Command-line task managers and note-taking tools written by Dmitri Popov.

Hope this two functions, will be helpful to console geeks out there.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 at 12:13 am and is filed under Curious Facts, Linux, System Administration, vim editor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.