Back when I didn't mind using GUIs, I was pretty impressed by what I read about Notational Velocity. I never owned a Mac so after some searching around I found nvpy, a nice cross-platform tool that tries to resemble its functionality. Alas - apart from the initial toying around - I never used it. The reason, as most of the time, was that it added friction to my workflow. You have to open it explicitly and do your edits inside the application. No modes, no vim keybindings and which virtual desktop was it on again?

A few days ago I came across this blog post and this lifehacker article that seemed like a good starting point to get some of the functionality without any friction.

I decided to use .md instead of .txt as a file suffix because I want to get used to writing markdown to take advantage of pandoc and my notes directory is ~/.notes instead of ~/notes so it won't clutter the output of ls in my home directory.

My nls() function is a little different from what is shown in the articles though:

nls() {
    tree -CR --noreport ~/.notes | sed 's/.md$//' | awk '{$1=""; print}' \
    | grep -i "$*"
}

This takes care of:

• removing the trailing .md (the 'sed ...' part)
• removing the leading characters of the tree output (the 'awk...' part)

The grep should be self-explanatory. If it isn't, there's always man grep.
This way I can use the output of this function as input for the n() function.

There was one more itch to scratch, though:

You can search for your note's titles but you can't do a full text search on all your notes, so if you don't remember which file contains the desired information, you're screwed.

Enter the Silver Searcher

There's a nice utility called The Silver Searcher that works as a grep replacement. With the -l option, it just prints the names of the files containing your search phrase. So in addition to the two functions mentioned in the above articles I wrote this small function:

nsearch() {
    cd ~/.notes/
    ag -l "$*" | sed 's/.md$//'
    cd - > /dev/null
}

Now, with

$ nsearch <my_phrase>

I get a list of all files in ~/.notes/ containing <my_phrase>. As above, the .md extension is removed from the output for use with the n() function.

I still have to take care about syncing my notes between machines, but it works for now.