Welcome to jotr

Jot down your ideas, thoughts and notes, without leaving the terminal.

TLDR:

Install:

npm i jotr -g

Usage:

To get started, simply write jotr in your terminal to start the editor. Use Ctrl+S to save and exit, Ctrl+C to exit without saving.

See your jot using jotr -l

Requirements

All three major platforms are supported, but with limited ability to test equally on all platforms, some platform specific bugs might occur.

Adding jots

jotr supports adding jots both from the cli and using a simple built-in editor.

One-liners

Use the following format for one-liners, similar to 'git commit -m "Some commit message"':

jotr [tags] -c <your jot>

Example:

jotr javascript -c 'let' is scoped to a block

Note that you can have multiple tags. The jot is stored with all tags. Example:

jotr javascript scope assignment -c 'let' is scoped to a block

Multi-line

For multi-line jots, you need to use the editor:

jotr javascript scope assignment

This clears the terminal window, presenting you with an empty space to write your heart out. Use Ctrl+D to save your jot. To cancel, just use Ctrl+C.

Listing and searching through the jots

You can list all jots using the -l or --list flags. If you supply tags as well, you will get a filtered result, displaying only the jots with those tags.

jotr -l

With flags:

jotr -l c++ pointers

If you are looking for a specific term, rather than a tag, you can use the -g or --grep flags with the term as an argument.

jotr -g scope

Editing and purging the raw data

Although jots are made to be remembered, sometimes you need to edit or remove one or more jots. To save you from having to search for the raw storage file, you can access it within the built-in editor using the --edit flag:

jotr --edit

Beware! This opens the entire YAML-file for editing, so be careful not to create syntax errors in the YAML-format. This will render the file unreadable by jotr until the error is fixed.

Use jotr -l --debug to assist you in pinpointing the error, or load the data file into an editor like VS Code (or online service) to use YAML-linting.

To completely empty the data file, you can use the purge function.

jotr --purge

Beware! Unless you have a backup of the data, the data is irrevocably lost.

Exporting your data

Tired of jotr? We're sorry to hear that. Here's how you export your data:

jotr --export some_filename.json

Exchange the .json extension with .yml to get YAML-formatted data instead of un-prettified JSON.

Some technicalities

jotr saves all jots in a YAML-file located in a sub-folder in the user's home folder. To go there, simply do:

cd ~/.jotr

Here you will find jots.yml. If you remove it, it will be re-created without the old data as the tool will try to create both the file and the directory on each run, if they do not exist.

Roadmap - in no particular order

• Add support for configuring the default behavior
• Add terminal coloring
• Replace or improve the built-in editor to be more intuitive and support basic features like cutting and pasting.
• Split package into jotr-cli and jotr-core, to get ready for other modules.
• Make CLI-parts into a module, runnable from CLI, and also importable in other packages.
• Tests!!!

API - using the core in you own project

If you are curious about the API of the core parts of jotr, take a look here. Note that the core only handles the reading and writing of data. The CLI-parts are, as of yet at least, not exportable.