quicknotes

quicknotes is a notes application that makes taking notes... quick. You can edit your notes using your preferred text editor, and all notes are saved locally in plain text.

Installation

quicknotes can be installed from Cargo via

cargo install quicknotes

Usage

To write a new note, all you have to do is run quicknotes new <title>.... For example, to create a new note about the time machine I am building, I would run quicknotes new Flux Capacitor Design.

By default, this will launch the editor stored in $EDITOR, but this is configurable. All notes have a preamble, which must be preserved so that quicknotes can index your note, but after that, write what you want! There are no rules on formatting.

---
title = "Flux Capacitor Design"
created_at = 2025-01-11T10:58:00.587807852-05:00
---

If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour...

If you want to go back and revise your note, you can use quicknotes open, and search for your note. In general, the index will be automatically built when editing a note, but if for any reason you need to rebuild the index, you can run quicknotes index.

quicknotes also supports "daily" notes, to aid your journaling. To open today's daily note, run quicknotes daily. This will create a new note with today's date, or open one if one already exists. You can also open a daily note from a previous day by doing quicknotes daily <offset>, where offset is a "fuzzy" date. You can either enter an absolute date (e.g. 2015-10-21), or a relative date (e.g. yesterday, 2 days ago).

Configuration

When you run quicknotes for the first time, a configuration file will be generated for you in your operating system's configuration directory.

# required, directory where notes are stored
notes_root = "/home/ferris/Documents/quicknotes/"

# required, file extension for notes
note_file_extension = ".md"

# optional, uses $EDITOR if not specified, or `nano` if $EDITOR is unset
editor_command = "/usr/bin/nvim"

Philosophy

I wrote quicknotes for my personal workflow, where I am constantly in a shell and often just want to write something down quickly. I've found that if I make my notes system too complicated, I'll end up doing silly things like pasting things in random vim buffers. To that end, I've designed quicknotes to be as frictionless as possible.

Contributions are absolutely welcome, but I will note that I have designed quicknotes for my needs, first and foremost, and may not accept new features unless they seem like something I could use. It is not my goal to design a "swiss-army-knife" notes app, as so many others have; I wanted a note-taking tool that would give me an easy framework I could use day-to-day, and worked out of the box.

Development

quicknotes is a bog-standard Rust project, so development should be as simple as cargo build to build the project, and cargo test to run the tests.

License

BSD-3