notes.sh: plain-text notes with IMAP synchronization

This note taking system is built for people who care about minimalism and want their software to last for decades. It is a single shell script that organizes all your plain-text notes insize a directory in a Maildir format. It is also editor-agnostic, so you can use vim, emacs or whichever you are comfortable with. Syncing between computers is trivial: just use any tool (like isync) that can sync a Maildir to any email hosting.

Maildir was created to store e-mail on a mail server/client, but is perfectly fine to store any kind of text. It saves every entry as a separate file in a MIME format. MIME in its simplest form is a few lines of "headers" followed by a plain-text content. It also has a feature to add attachments to the same file, by encoding them in base64.

Even if you see that this repository hasn't been updated for a long time, rest assured that it still works. Its only dependencies are standard POSIX tools.

Features

• Keep notes in a single Maildir (by default in ~/Maildir/personal/Notes
• Sync your notes with any email server, from multiple devices
• Specify the editor to use by changing $EDITOR environment variable
• Notes are identified by a unique ID
• You can link between notes using their IDs and create a knowledge graph
• There is support for adding attachments like images, PDFs, and other
• Small codebase, so very easy to read through and extend to your liking
• Zero dependencies, except for POSIX tools

Installation

Copy notes.sh script anywhere in your $PATH.

Usage

By default, notes.sh will create new entries in ~/Maildir/personal/Notes, which you can override by setting $NOTES_SH_BASEDIR.

To create a new note (will open a new editor window):

./notes.sh -n

To list all existing notes with their titles:

./notes.sh -l

To select a note with fuzzy search and edit it (needs fzf):

./notes.sh -l | fzf --tac --with-nth="2..-1" | xargs -o ./notes.sh -e

Aliases

In day-to-day usage, you likely won't type the long commands for editing notes. Just put the following aliases into ~/.bashrc to make things easier:

# Type "nn" to create a new note
alias nn="notes.sh -n"

# Type "ne" to look up and edit an existing note
alias ne="notes.sh -l | fzf --tac --with-nth=\"2..-1\" | xargs -o notes.sh -e"

Publishing notes to HTML

If you want to publish your notes to the web, you can use a simple converter from Markdown to HTML that I wrote, which is similar in spirit to notes.sh (simple, single-file script). You can find it here: markdown.awk.

With it, you can do the following:

notes.sh --export <note id> | markdown.awk > result.html

License

Distributed under the terms of the BSD License