hod: donno in Haskell

A full-featured note-taking application in terminal.

Features

• Easy note management: add, update, list, remove note;
• Organize notes in hierarchical notebooks;
• Full featured formating support: you can add rich texts (markdown), mathematical formula (mathjax, LaTeX), diagrams, charts (mermaid), images, and attachments. All will be rendered and displayed lively in your browser;
• Powerful and fast full-text search. Get all information at your fingers;
• Safe and secure: all notes are saved in plain texts (markdown). You own your data. You can view and update your notes without any specific applications but a text editor when necessary. All notes store in private git repository;
• Live in console: git style APIs. No need to learn a new GUI app. Get your notes anytime, anywhere: Linux, macOS, Windows (through WSL), Android (by Termux), SSH, ...

Install

Copy executable hod to a folder in your $PATH.

Prerequisites

• git for note synchronization;
• pandoc and mermaid for preview with browser.

On Debian-based systems, install them with:

apt install git pandoc
npm install -g @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli mermaid-filter

Usage

List all commands with hod.

Add attachments in a note

You can add attachments in your notes as in any other markdown file:

1. Copy the attachment file into folder /resources;
2. In your note, add a reference to your attachment.

For example, to add a image named "myimg.png", copy it to folder ~/.donno/repo/resources and add a reference ![my image](resources/myimg.png) in your note. To add other attachment (instead of an image), say "myatt.pdf", copy it to folder ~/.donno/repo/resources and add a reference [my doc](resources/myatt.pdf).

To make it more convenient, you can define some helper command in your editor. For example, with my helper function for vim, you can simply add image or other file in one step:

:Atti myimg.png    " use filename as caption
:Atti myimg.png MyImage  " specify the caption as *MyImage*
:Atti myatt.pdf    " use filename as caption
:Atti myatt.pdf MyDoc  " specify the caption as *MyDoc*

Configuration

File path: ~/.config/hod/config.json

Configuration Items

General

• app_home: root folder of donno data files. Default: ~/.donno
• repo: folder to save all note files and resource files. Default: $app_home/repo
• editor: which application to use to create/update note. Default: nvim
• viewer: which application to use to view notes in console. Default: nvim -R
• default_notebook: default notebook name for a new note. Default: /Diary
• logging level: debug or info(default)
• editor_envs: environment variables of the editor. For example, env XDG_CONFIG_HOME is used by neovim to load config/plugins to parse markdown files. Default: ~/.config

Blog

• url: blog url
• publish_cmd: command to publish notes to blog

Manage Configurations

hod conf get                # list all current configurations
hod conf get edtior         # get which editor to use
hod conf set editor nvim    # set the editor, make sure you've installed it
hod conf set default_notebook /Diary/2020

# set nested attribute:
hod conf set editor_envs.XDG_CONFIG_HOME $HOME/.config/vimrcs/text

# restore default values of configurations:
hod conf restore

Advanced search

You can search notes by their title, tags, notebook, created date and updated date by adding -a option after search command and one or more search terms:

hod s -a [ ...]

Each term is a 3-tuple:

range:word[:style]

range can be one of ti/ta/nb/cr/up/co, meaning title, tag, notebook, created, updated or all contents, respectively.

word is the word you want to search.

style is optional, defaulting to Wi (not-whole-word-match and ignore-case). Its candidates include:

• w: whole word match
• W: not whole word match
• i: ignore case
• I: strict case
• b: before the date specified in word section when range is cr or up
• B: not earlier than the date specified in word section when range is cr or up

For example, the following command searches all notes that contains a tag ltr (whole-word-match and ignore case), updated after 2021.6.1 and in notebook whose name contains string tech, case insensitive:

hod s -a ta:ltr:wi up:2021-06-01:B nb:tech

Other examples:

hod s -a ti:python  # search all notes with "python" in their titles
hod s -a co:python:w  # whole word match for "python" anywhere in the note

Synchronization between Multiple Devices

Main method: VCS

To sync notes between multiple devices, you need a remote VCS (version control system) repository. The simplest way is creating it on a source-code-hosting platform, such as github.com, gitlab.com, gitee.com, etc.

Then push your local note folder (get its path with hod conf get repo, if you didn't set it explicitly) to remote repository.

On a new device, clone the remote repository to the local note folder.

When you update notes on device A, and want to sync the changes to device B, run git pull in the local note folder of device B.

With the powerful merge function of git, you can create and/or update notes on multiple devices simultaneously, then sync them with rebase or other methods.

Complement method: patch file

When the changes of notes are too small to form a meaningful commit, you can patch them to a file, then restore it on another device.

Publish to Blog

If you want to publish notes in a specified notebook to blog, see blog doc for details.

Roadmap

In developing

On schedule

1. Basic publishing module: publish to blog, such as github.io

2. Advanced publishing function: publish specific note, or notes in specific notebook

3. Search notes with the whole words;

4. Better appearance: beautify output table with libraries like colored, tabulate, etc

5. Search notes with keywords (which is extracted with AI algorithms, such as NLP, TF-IDF, etc);

6. Similar notes recommendations of a specific note with recommendation algorithms;

7. Note syntax check with NLP;

8. Knowledge graph construction and visualization (in TUI) from a specific root (note);

9. Note translation, English to Chinese and vice versa.

10. Suggest when typing. For example: press TAB after input hod s py, some candidates displayed below: python, pyhive, pynvim, ...

Completed

1. Synchronize notes with patch file as the complement to the main sync mechanism based on git;

2. Basic note-taking functions: add, delete, list, search, view, update notes

3. Configuration module: see Configuration;

4. Preview: render markdown notes to HTML and previewed in browser

5. Support adding attachments into notes, especially images

6. Add logging system, distinguish application (for end user) and debugging (for developer) logs

7. Notebook management: list notebooks, list notes in specified notebook

8. Synchronize notes between hosts (based on VCS, such as git)

9. Import/Export from/to other open source note-taking apps, such as Joplin

10. Advanced search function: search by title, tag, notebook and content

11. Search with regular expression