git-memo

Note-taking app built on pure git goodness.

git-memo is a developer journal or daybook implemented as a git repo. Want to take and keep notes in git? Go for it.

Why?

I wanted a simple place to take notes/memos while working. This includes programming, researching, todos, and team communication. After searching around for a good command-line note-taking tool, I found they all harshed my mellow what with their opinions, marginality, and generally doing more than I need. Meanwhile, git commands are a staple of my diet and now thoroughly engrained in muscle-memory. I thought, why not just keep all these memos in git?

I know what you're thinking. That's so wasteful! A git repo will take up SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much more disk space than a simple text file and have so many more features than you need. Yeah. So what? We're talking about tiny amounts of disk so what does it matter. Plus, I like the features git has for listing out the reflog and squashing and merging commits. This script accomplishes what I want in a note-taking app in less than 50 LOC. YMMV.

Features

git-memo adds your notes to a git repo as an empty commit. It allows you to maintain different streams of notes as different branches. Why is this useful? It's useful to me because I work on different projects for different clients. I don't always remember to fill in my time-sheets while my work is still fresh in mind. Apart from reviewing code commits, I wanted a way to record my client activity whether or not I was committing code.

Maybe you need a simple way to report out your activity. With git branches, this is as simple as logging out the messages.

If you want to see an overall log of your activity across all your projects, just merge them into a single branch.

Best of all, because this is git, you can host your repo wherever you want and your notes are your own. Want to back it up? Push (git push --all <remote>) to a private github or bitbucket repo. Easy-peasy.

Non-Features

Working on a team? I suppose you could all keep notes and merge them together. Sounds crazy but in a mad world only the mad are sane, so give it a try if that's your thing.
Want fancy formatting? Other than paragraphs and bullets and codeblocks, you're pretty limited in markup. Oh well. The good news is that whatever markup survives your git commit can be rendered later using whatever markup engine you like.
Want TODO lists and all that jazz, try org-mode.

Installation

Linux

To use, source the functions to your session or add them to your .bashrc file.

echo "source /path/to/repo/git-memo.sh" >> $HOME/.bashrc

OSX

I think this is POSIX-compliant but I haven't tested it. Go for it!

Windows

Cygwin or the Linux Subsystem is your best bet.

Using git-memo

To take a note just type log. This will open a familiar git commit prompt in your default editor. log is just what I found easy to type, change it to whatever alias you like:

alias mylog=new_git_memo
alias mylogl=list_git_memo

If you are working on a particular project, just add the project name like log myproj

To see all your commit messages, use logl or logl myproj or just pop into the git-memo dotdir and use git as you would normally.

That's really all there is to it. Enjoy!

Contributing (aka ur bash-fu sux and ur stoopid)

If you notice an error in this code or a better way to make git do things it really don't wanna do, submit a PR or fork it and go forth and prosper.