scrbl

Description

scrbl is a stupid little application that lets me manage my quick scribbles (aka notes) in a hierarchal way. Notes are of any specified filetype, and are opened in the user's $EDITOR, or configured binary. scrbl exposes a natural, frictionless interface for handling and organizing notes.

At some point I may add some syncing feature to something remote, e.g., Google drive or a server via scp. Thus far, my notes tend to be so ephemeral that this has not really been a priority of mine.

Note on the code

I did this project largely for the sake of getting some practical Haskell experience, i.e., writing some "real-world" Haskell code. As a result, there are some design choices here that are probably not good at all, such as hand-coding command line argument parsing instead of using a dependency like parseargs, or writing an excessive amount of test code to familiarize myself with HUnit.

Usage

$ scrbl --help
scrbl [--help|-h] [--config CONFIG] [segments...] scribble_file[.extension]

NOTE: The order of arguments, except for --help/-h is not flexible. If you specify a --config, it must come before, e.g., [segments...]. This is due to the fact that it is ambiguous whether --config CONFIG refers to a segment or is a flag, thanks to Unix file name rules allowing such characters. This is likely fixable if I had used someone's better-and-more-robustly written library for argument parsing, but I wanted to get more practice with Haskell, so here we are.

Examples

$ scrbl --help || scrbl -h
$ scrbl my_new_scribble
$ scrbl supergroup subgroup my_scribble # creates <BASE>/supergroup/subgroup/note

Configuration

Configuration is handled via a JSON file. Although a configuration file can be specified to scrbl, generally, this is not recommended as it makes usage of scrbl clunky. Instead, when called without --config, scrbl will look for this JSON configuration file in the following places, in order of priority descending: 1. ~/.config/scrbl/scrbl.json 2. ~/.scrbl.json 3. /etc/scrbl/scrbl.json

The JSON configuration file is short and simple, because scrbl is simple. A description of this JSON file is as follows.

{
    "base": "<filepath(directory)>",
    "editor": "<binary name|filepath(binary)>",
    "extension": "<dot-extension>"
}

Below is some extra information on the fields shown above: