scrawl

What?

Scrawl is a CLI for structuring, creating, organizing, indexing, searching, editing, pdf-ifying, and version-controlling your notes.

Why?

Scrawl lets you:

• stay in a shell when you're taking notes.
• keep your notes organized and accessible
• track and distribute them with version control

Get started

• install the package globally: npm install -g scrawl-notes
• create a new directory that you want to keep notes in.
• execute scrawl init and confirm the prompt
• open the new scrawl.json file in that same directory, and configure it to your liking (see below for instructions)
• create your first note with scrawl new. You're off to the races.

PROTIP: If you want to use only local versions of scrawl for whatever reason, add an alias to your .bashrc: alias scrawl='./node_modules/scrawl-notes/index.js'.

API

new

Creates a new markdown file with metadata at the top, followed by the subsections you specify. You will be prompted to provide metadata based on properties you declare in scrawl.json.

Converts any recently changed markdown files in notes_src to PDFs, and drops them in notes_dist. New files are automatically built, so you don't need to run this everytime you create one.

clean [harder]

scrawl clean empties your notes_dist directory. scrawl clean harder cleans out notes_src, notes_dist, and index.json. Basically a clean slate. You will be prompted to confirm whether you really want to delete everything in either case.

list [keyword]

scrawl list prints a formatted list of all your notes. scrawl list [keyword] returns a formatted list of any notes with metadata or text containing your keyword. The current implementation relies on grep, so you can pass any pattern you want to match.

open [note_id] [--pdf]

Opens a markdown file for editing (or the built PDF if --pdf is passed in), using either your default markdown editor or the command line program you specify in scrawl.json.

init

Only run this when you're setting up a new directory of notes. Otherwise bad things will happen.

build

Checks for changes to markdown files and updates the PDFs of any of the dirty ones. If you add email and pw properties (your email address and the path to a local file containing your email password), scrawl will send you an email everytime you build with pdfs attached. This may be more configurable in the future.

save

Shorthand for git add -all && git commit -m ${new Date()} && git push

status

A correlary of git status or scrawl notes. Gives you an idea of what you've got in your notes repo, and what's dirty.

config

• metadata: an array of objects specifying the metadata you would like to gather about each note, which will also be displayed the top of each note.

The configuration of metadata strictly implements the API for prompt.

{
    description: 'Enter your password',     // Prompt displayed to the user. If not supplied name will be used.
    type: 'string',                 // Specify the type of input to expect.
    pattern: /^\w+$/,                  // Regular expression that input must be valid against.
    message: 'Password must be letters', // Warning message to display if validation fails.
    hidden: true,                        // If true, characters entered will not be output to console.
    default: 'lamepassword',             // Default value to use if no value is entered.
    required: true                        // If true, value entered must be non-empty.
    before: function(value) { return 'v' + value; } // Runs before node-prompt callbacks. It modifies user's input
  }

• subsections is an array of objects where you specify the subsections you would like to be included in each new note. Currently, two properties are passed: title and tag, which refers to a valid html tag. e.g.

"subsections": [
    {
      "tag":"h4",
      "text":"questions"
    },
    {
      "tag":"h4",
      "text":"criticisms"
    }
]

• openCmd is the command you want to execute to open your markdown files ('e.g.: "vi"`. If nothing is provided, the file will be opened with your default markdown editor.

• email and pw will trigger email notifications with changed files attached everytime you build. Currently, gmail accounts are the only ones this will work for.