Notes in the Terminal like in Notational Velocity

README.md

Notes in the Terminal like in Notational Velocity

The way that Notational Velocity allows to manage your notes is genious, but only available to macOS users. That software presents a list of your notes next to the editable preview of a the selected note and a powerful full-text search filters the list of notes. As all the notes are stored as plain text files they can easily synchronized. This article presents an alternative note managing tool that works for major operating systems, is free and open source.

The setup combines ranger and ones' favourite terminal based editor. We assume that both are set up and describe some configuration tweaks that makes this combination come closer to nvAlt or Notational Velocity.

General Configuration

$EDITOR variable

Make sure the editor variable is set in the shells configuration file, e.g. ~/.bashrc. This is the editor that will be used to modify the text. For example export EDITOR="nano".

Ranger

Lets assume that all the notes are located as text files in the folder notes in the users directory. For the listing of files ranger allows that certain preferences apply for certain folders, e.g. whenever the folder ~/notes is shown the listing shall be sorted in a certain way. We show and explain parts of the ranger configuration file rc.conf.

The listing is sorted by last modification time for the most recently changed or added note to appear on top.

setlocal path=~/notes$ sort mtime
setlocal path=~/notes$ sort_reverse false

At the time one wants to see only the notes directory with the listing next to the preview of the text file.

setlocal path=~/notes$ preview_files true
setlocal path=~/notes$ column_ratios 1,1
setlocal path=~/notes$ viewmode miller

By default the list of notes can be cluttered with each notes size, a line number, and the file extension (here txt). All these are hidden.

setlocal path=~/notes$ display_size_in_main_column false
setlocal path=~/notes$ display_size_in_status_bar false
setlocal path=~/notes$ line_numbers false
default_linemode filename
default_linemode path=/.*?/.*?/notes/.*\.txt  notes_linemode

The python function notes_linemode strips off the extension. It should be put in the file plugins/notes_linemode.py inside the ranger configuration directory.

import ranger.api
import ranger.core.linemode
import os.path

@ranger.api.register_linemode
class MyLinemode(ranger.core.linemode.LinemodeBase):
    name = "notes_linemode"
    uses_metadata = False

    def filetitle(self, file, metadata):
        return os.path.splitext(file.relative_path)[0]

Features

• Search
  With the configuration alias n scout -aeit one can write :n followed by any search term, which will focus on the first match. One can move on to the next match with the <tab> key.
• Editing notes
  When the focus is on the note that we want to edit pressing either <return>, l or <right> opens the note in the $EDITOR.
• Creating new notes
  Commands that are not mapped to a key combination can be send to ranger in the command mode (which is started by colon :). Writing :touch Some Name.txt creates the new note with the name Some Name.txt. In the argument to the touch command automatically sanitized and there is no need to escape the space character.
• Bookmark to notes
  If ranger is used for other purposes than notes managment we suggest to set a bookmark. With the default configuration m n will mark the present directory to be remembered by letter n. The keys 'n will return to the bookmark from any other folder.
• Flat directories
  If the notes are organized in a hierarchical directory structure the flat setting, as below, shows all files regardless whether they are in a subfolder inside the notes folder.

  setlocal path=~/notes$ flat 2
  

• Reveal a file
  Show the presently highlighted file in another file manager with the % key, for example on macOS with the following setting the file is shown in Finder: map % shell open -R %s.

The flexibility of ranger allows for more simple usage and for further magical adjustments, e.g. git integration, highlighting code in notes or showing pictures inline.

Links

• ranger documentation
• Notational Velocity -- the original.
• nvAlt -- a maintained and improved version of the original.
• nvTerm -- a command line version written in python

Example configuration

A configuration which is extracted from this article is joined below.

~/.config/ranger
├── plugins
│   └── notes_linemode.py
└── rc.conf

Assuming you saved this configuration, try it out:

$ git clone https://github.com/hendricius/the-bread-code ~/notes
$ EDITOR=nano ranger --debug --clean --cachedir=/tmp --datadir=/tmp --confdir=~/.configdir/ranger/ ~/notes

notes_linemode.py

import ranger.api
import ranger.core.linemode
import os.path

@ranger.api.register_linemode
class MyLinemode(ranger.core.linemode.LinemodeBase):
    name = "notes_linemode"
    uses_metadata = False

    def filetitle(self, file, metadata):
        return os.path.splitext(file.relative_path)[0]

rc.conf

set save_console_history false
set hostname_in_titlebar false
set tilde_in_titlebar true
set column_ratios [1,1]
flat 2

setlocal path=~/notes$ sort mtime
setlocal path=~/notes$ sort_reverse false
setlocal path=~/notes$ preview_files true
setlocal path=~/notes$ column_ratios 1,1
setlocal path=~/notes$ viewmode miller
setlocal path=~/notes$ display_size_in_main_column false
setlocal path=~/notes$ display_size_in_status_bar false
setlocal path=~/notes$ line_numbers false
default_linemode filename
default_linemode path=/.*?/.*?/notes/.*\.md  notes_linemode

# works on macOS
map % shell open -R %s

alias n scout -aeit