I recently came across a blog post by fellow Recurser Peter Lyons. The whole blog post resonated with me, but, the section about taking notes in particular made such a big impression that I decided to implement it right away. I wrote a tiny utility for note-taking on the CLI, and I’ve been using it for the last few days.
Let me tell you a little bit about it. I won’t talk about my motivations for starting to take notes, because Peter said it better than I possibly could, but I will share the observations and insights I’ve gathered while writing the tool and using it for the first few days.
I mostly work in my terminal, e-mail client, and browser1. Most ideas, flashes of inspirations, and frustrations happen in the terminal. That’s why I definitely need a tool that I can call on the command line, quickly, and that lets me quickly scribble up a note. Latency should be non-existent, and I should be able to compose both quick notes and longer, more complex ideas. That’s why I settled on a simple command line interface that is mode-driven and intuitive.
I think having a low-friction interface is key to developing a habit like this, at least for me. I resorted to writing my own tool, because, as I detailed above, I yearned for a tool that is intuitive. In this case, this means intuitive for me, and, because the tool is so simple, I felt like I could comfortably write the one I needed in one sitting.
Quick notes should be the easiest to get to, because it’s likely that I compose them in a hurry. As such, any list of arguments whose first element is not a known command is interpreted as a note. That enables me to just punch in the name of the command and then the note without any delay.
Composing more elaborate notes should drop me into an editor, much like composing a long commit message does. For this, I decided to honor the $EDITOR path variable. Not because I need it per se, but because it is good practice and I consider it standard behavior. I refuse to adhere to YAGNI when I’m not at work.
Searching and dumping the logs will probably happen less frequently, and so I spent less time on those features. Because the logs are stored in a regular file, I can use any text wrangling tool that my shell and Operating System provide, and that should often be more than enough. Of course I included the features anyway, for completeness’s sake and because I was on a roll.
All in all, my tool still suffers from feature envy when compared to Peter’s tooling, but for now it’s more about actually taking notes and developing a habit than having the perfect system. Like most of my private tools, including a lot of the scripts powering this blog, it is a work in progress.
Why did I tell you all of this? Reading this blog post again, it pretty much feels like a braindump, a note about notes. Maybe I felt the urge to write something that’s less refined than my usual output. Maybe taking notes whetted my appetite for quicker, more instantaneous modes of written communication. Or maybe I’m just very excited about having another productivity tool in my belt.
Whatever it is, I thoroughly enjoy it.
Footnotes
1. Lately Rambox has also been in my list of open applications, because it neatly separates the communication tools from the rest of the world and reduces the amount of tabs I have open, but that’s an implementation detail.