NeoNote

NeoNote is a terminal app to manage your notes. NeoNote stores your notes for you and provides filtering and searching options to find them easily.

Features

• Create/Edit/Delete Notes
• Parses tags directly from your note
• Filter notes based on tag and creation/modification date
• Fuzzy search notes incrementally

Installation

Binary files

You can find builds for linux x86 in the releases section.

Build from source

NeoNote is built with the Haskell build tool cabal. You'll need it along with a recent Haskell compiler.

To build from source, run:

cabal build all

Then, you will find the executable inside the dist-newstyle folder.

Get Started

Take a look at the NeoNote help menu to get a quick overview of the commands and to explore the various options. Each command can be shortened to one letter, eg. nn c instead of nn create.

Create a note

nn create

An editor will open where you can write your note. Tags will be automatically found when you use the # symbol within a note. You can also start composing your note directly in the terminal by just typing the text:

nn c "Your first note with #neonote"

Using the note picker

To review already existing notes, you will normally use the picker UI. It can be opened with the following command:

nn pick

Within this UI, you can incrementally search through your notes. It is possible to edit with ENTER, delete with CTRL-X and view with CTRL-Y. You can also apply a filter before picking from your notes with the --filter option.

Processing notes without the picker

nn edit

edit will directly open your editor with all matched notes. Per default, it will only match 1 note with no searching or filtering. This means it will open the note which was last modified.

You can specify a filter, a search term and the amount of notes to match. The following command will open at most 3 notes with the tag #neonote and the word todo.

nn edit --filter neonote --number 3 todo 

Similarly to the edit command, there exist delete and view commands to delete and view multiple notes.

This will delete up to a hundred notes with the tag #archived.

nn delete --filter archived --number 100

This will view up to 10 notes with the word linux

nn view --number 10 linux

List notes

The list command gives you an overview of your notes by printing them in a table and giving you information about their modification date or their tags.

nn list

Per default, the modification date, the tags and a preview of the content is shown. You can change which attributes of the note are shown with --attribute (-a for short):

nn list --attribute id --attribute created

Now, id and created will be shown instead of the default modified and tags. The content preview will always be shown regardless of given attributes.

Of course, you can combine this normal filtering and searching. The following command will list up to 5 notes with the #blog tag and the word haskell.

nn l --filter blog --number 5 haskell

Tags

You can add a tag to your notes simply by writing #your-tag somewhere within the note. Currently, tags may consist of english characters as well as - (no numbers!).

Filter notes

You can filter before searching with the --filter argument.

nn view --filter "programming"

This will only allow you to pick between notes which have the tag programming. This can also be used with delete, edit and list.

Boolean logic for filtering

• * matches every note
• a & b matches if both a and b match
• a | b matches if either a or b matches
• ~ a matches if a does not match
• Use brackets ((a)) to group expressions

nn view --filter "*" # matches everything
nn view --filter "programming & ~html" # matches notes with the tag programming but not the tag html
nn view --filter "programming | coding" # matches notes with either the tag programming or the tag coding
nn view --filter "(programming | coding) & ~html" # combine expressions with brackets

Date filters

In addition to filtering for tags, you can also filter based on the creation and modification date of a note.

• >, <, = operators for dates
• created and modified literal to access the date of a note
• YYYY-MM-DD for day literals
• HH-MM-SS for time literals

nn view --filter "created = 2023-07-01" # matches all notes created on 2023-07-01
nn view --filter "modified = 2023-07-01" # matches all notes modified on 2023-07-01
nn view --filter "modified > 2023-07-01" # matches all notes modified after 2023-07-01
nn view --filter "modified < 2023-07-01" # matches all notes modified before 2023-07-01
nn view --filter "modified > 2023-05-30 & modified < 2023-07-01" # matches all notes modified in June 2023
nn view --filter "modified > 2023-07-01 & programming" # matches all notes modified after 2023-07-01 with the tag programming
nn view --filter "modified > 10:30:00" # matches all notes modified after 10:30:00

In the future, less restrictive date specifications will be possible. For example, you could apply the filter modified = July or created = around 10am.

Configuration

You have two options to specify configurations:

• config.ini within the xdg config directory which will be created on the first neonote execution
• environment variables (NEONOTE_PATH, NEONOTE_EDITOR, NEONOTE_EXTENSION)

Default note location

Per default, neonote stores notes as md (Markdown) files in a folder neonote in the XDG data directory (.local/share/neonote on Linux).

Possible Editors

You can choose any editor you want by specifying it in the configuration. However, you need to make sure that the editor blocks until the editing process is finished and that it can open multiple files simultanously.

If your editor command has a %, it will be replaced with the files to edit separated by a . If it does not have a %, the files are appended at the end of your command.

Here are some example editor configurations:

• Vim: vim or vim %
• Helix: helix or helix %
• Nano: nano or nano %
• VSCode: code --wait or code --wait %
• VSCodium: codium --wait or code --wait %