cadmus

Shell Scripts to Facilitate Effective Note Taking

Introduction

Essentially I used to have a dozen shell scripts in ~/bin that I use to capture notes, this is an attempt to wrap them into a single script and then have aliases to make them quick to access.

The idea is that it is just a menu to dispatch different scripts so I could share those scripts with classmates.

Design Philosophy

• cadmus acts as a menu for scripts to acheive things
  • the script name will should always be printed to the terminal so the individual script can be repurposed with out fishing through code.
• Subscripts will should take only one argument (or STDIN)
  • If the first argument is either -h or --help help will be printed and then exit 0
  • This might lead to some limitations but the simplicity is for sanity, modularity and extensibility.
  • Will always return absolute path.
    • I played around with relative path but it got confusing when calling the script from inside a function inside a script, so instead if you want a relative path you should do scriptname './' | xargs realpath --relative-to='./'
• Be a Front end to tie together different scripts and tools
• Don't replicate work other people have done.
• Plain Text, Open Source.
• Be Modular
  • Pipe in input, output goes to STDOUT
  • Leave Aliases and piping to the user
    • See Recommended Aliases
• cadmus will take the notes directory from the global variable CADMUS_NOTES_DIR
  • The Actual work will be done by subscripts denoted by description.bash
    • The subscripts will take the note directory as an argument so they are portable and modular
  • The Arguments will be shifted and then all passed down to subfunctions

Installation

To install:

1. satisfy the dependencies

2. Set up Recoll

3. Download cadmus and put it in the PATH

   git clone https://github.com/RyanGreenup/cadmus ~/.cadmus  \
   || echo "Delete $HOME/.cadmus first"
   ln -s "$HOME/.cadmus/bin/cadmus" "$HOME/.local/bin/"
   

   3. According to the SystemD Standard ~/.local/bin should be in $PATH, if you are using some other init implementation you can add this directory to "$PATH" it by doing something like this:

      ## Should work in bash/zsh/fish
      echo $PATH | grep "$HOME/.local/bin" &> /dev/null && echo "$HOME/.local/bin in path already" || ls "$HOME/.local/bin" &> /dev/null && echo 'PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin"' >> $HOME/.profile
      
      

4. You will probably need to change the directory to your notes in the script:

   which cadmus | xargs xdg-open
   

   readonly NOTES_DIR="$HOME/Notes/"
   readonly SERVER_DIR="/var/www/html/MD"
   readonly MKDOCS_YML="$HOME/Notes/mkdocs.yml" 
   

-->

Configuring recoll

Currently the search just uses the default recoll config, I intend to modify this to use ~/.cadmus as a config directory so as to not interfere with the default config.

It isn't in practice an issue if ~/.recoll is indexing more than the notes because you can just modify the call to Skim (sk) in ..cadmus.. to start the call with ~/Notes/MD.

Usage

It's all Menu driven so just follow the diagram to do what you need.

Assumptions

It is assumed that:

1. Notes are:
   1. Markdown files with a .md extension
   2. Underneath ~/Notes (you ma)
   3. Recoll updates it's index on the fly
      • ~/Notes will need to be indexed by Recoll so the results will show up.
2. SSD
   • I use an SSD and some scripts are pretty inefficient (like grep | cut | xargs find to avoid creating a variable), I don't know if things like would work on a HDD.
3. All Notes have Unique Names
4. On MacOS you'll need to define xdg-open so do something like:

alias xdg-open='open &>/dev/null' 

Dependencies

• highlight
• recode
• node
• fzf
• skim
• rg
  • Make sure to include pcre2, this comes in Arch, if using cargo:

    cargo install ripgrep --features 'pcre2' 
    

• perl
• python
• tmsu^AUR
• ranger
• mdcat^AUR
• xclip
• sd
• fd
• sed
• cut
• grep
• find
• GNU realpath
• Recoll
• Pandoc
• bat

Recommended for all Features

• WeasyPrint
• tectonic
• nvim
• Kitty
  • I've also heard good things about iterm2
• MkDocs
  • MkDocs Material Theme
  • MkDocs Material Extensions
• MarkText
• VNote

recommended / Interesting / Helpful packages not required

• readability-cli
• mdless
• VSCode

PATH

If installed with pip or cargo it will be necessary to add these directories to your PATH:

## bash
echo '
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"
' >> ~/.bashrc

## zsh
echo '
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"
' >> ~/.bashrc

## fish

echo '
set PATH $HOME/.local/bin $PATH
set PATH $HOME/bin $PATH
set PATH "$HOME/.cargo/bin $PATH
' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Recommended Aliases

I wrote all this with aliases in mind, when I settle on some aliases i'll put up my fish functions. (I also wanted to do some autocomplete.)

Related

• DNote
• TNote
• Notable