tdo

Fast & Simple Note Taking! 📃🚀

tdo in action

tdo is a opinionated, command line based note-taking system. Demo video

✨ Features

• Can help you manage a daily log, todos, journal and notes
• Review pending and upcoming todos, past journal entries and more
• Integrates with git to commit and backup your notes automatically, check tdo.nvim for neovim integration
• Has interactive fuzzy searching capabilities powered by fzf
• Can integrate with other tools in pipes and subshells for extended functionality
• Supports all editors, set $EDITOR to your choice

⚡ Setup

📋 Requirements

• ripgrep, fzf
• bat (optional, for syntax highlighting in search)
• coreutils (required on macOS, for gdate command)

💻 Installation

git clone https://github.com/2kabhishek/tdo
cd tdo
./install.sh

📦 Environment Variables

• NOTES_DIR should point to your notes directory

• TODOS_DIR optional, should point to your todos directory, default: NOTES_DIR/todos

• JOURNAL_DIR optional, should point to your journal directory, default: NOTES_DIR/entries

• EDITOR set to your choice of editor

🐚 Manual Installation

If you want to customize the setup or are facing issues with installation, you can set up tdo manually.

Change these commands according to your needs.

# Link tdo to a directory that's in PATH (~/.local/bin here)
ln -sfnv "$PWD/tdo.sh" ~/.local/bin/tdo
# Create a notes dir if not already present
mkdir -p $HOME/Projects/Notes
# Add the NOTES_DIR env var to your shell config ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc etc
echo "NOTES_DIR=$HOME/Projects/Notes" >> ~/.zshrc
# Add sample templates to your NOTES_DIR
cp -irv templates $NOTES_DIR
# Reload shell config
source ~/.zshrc

💾 Git Integration

If you want to sync your notes across devices, you can set up a git repo on the $NOTES_DIR and add GitHub/GitLab as remote.

cd $NOTES_DIR
git init
git add .
git commit -m 'init: notes'
git remote add origin <your-remote-git-url>
git push origin main

tdo will automatically commit every change with a timestamp like 03 Feb 11:33 as commit message.

🚀 Usage

If you use Neovim, I highly recommend using tdo.nvim, it seamlessly integrates tdo and nvim and adds some useful features on top.

• tdo to open today's todos
• tdo <offset_days> to open todos from offset_days in the past or future, e.g: tdo 1, tdo -2
• tdo <note_title> to open or create a note_tile.md note, use folder names to categorise notes, e.g: tdo tech/vim-tips
• tdo note or tdo n to create a new note with the current timestamp in drafts
• tdo entry or tdo e to open today's journal entry
• tdo entry <offset_days> to open journal entry from offset_days in the past or future, e.g: tdo e -3
• tdo find <text> or tdo f to interactively search for text in all your notes
• tdo find without any search term to review all your notes
• tdo todo or tdo t to show all your pending todos
• tdo commit <path> or tdo c to commit changes in path, happens automatically, needed for plugins and integrations

Run tdo h to get help info on the command line

📁 Dir Structure

tdo expects an opinionated directory structure to function.

• Notes live in the notes sub-dir, use these for long term knowledge management, second brain
• Notes use the templates/note.md file as template
• Todos live in the todos sub-dir, use these for short term notes, daily todos
• Todos use the templates/todo.md file as template
• Journal entries live in entries sub-dir, use these for personal notes, life logging
• Journal entries use the templates/entry.md file as template

├── todos
│   └── 2023
│       └── 11
│           └── 2023-11-29.md
├── entries
│   └── 2024
│       └── 02
│           └── 2024-02-03.md
│── notes
│   └── tech
│       └── quit-vim.md
│       └── arch-btw.md
└── templates
    ├── entry.md
    └── note.md
    └── todo.md

⚙️ Configuration

You can configure tdo by either defining environment variables or via a $HOME/.config/tdorc file.

• ADD_ENTRY_TIMESTAMP [boolean]: Whether to add a time stamp when using tdo entry or tdo e.
• ADD_NEW_NOTE_TIMESTAMP [boolean]: Whether to add a time stamp when creating new notes with tdo <note_title>.
• FILE_NAME_AS_TITLE [boolean]: Whether to add the file name as title when creating new notes with tdo <note_title>. If true, then it adds <note_title> as a markdown title in the first line of the new note.
• ENTRY_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT [string]: can be any bash string such as a date format expression. It is ignored if ADD_ENTRY_TIMESTAMP is set to false.
• NOTE_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT([string]: can be any bash string such as a date format expression. It is ignored if ADD_NEW_NOTE_TIMESTAMP is set to false.

Default Configs

ADD_ENTRY_TIMESTAMP=true
ADD_NEW_NOTE_TIMESTAMP=false
FILE_NAME_AS_TITLE=false
# Reads ## Mon, 12:00 PM
ENTRY_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT="## %a, %I:%M %p"
# Reads ## Fri. Apr 06, 2024 - 06:48 PM
NOTE_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT="## %a. %b %d, %Y - %I:%M %p"

configs defined in tdorc will override corresponding environment variables

🏗️ What's Next

You tell me!

🧑‍💻 Behind The Code

🌈 Inspiration

After trying out every note management system under the sun I had decided on using plain markdown notes powered by nvim2k.

tdo is a spiritual successor and complimentary tool to that, taking the same principles and making it more accessible and simple.

🔍 More CLI Tools

• cmtr — Fast git commits
• mkrepo — Spin up new GitHub repos from the CLI
• ghpm — Manage all your GitHub repos
• gsync — Sync your git repos

🧰 Tooling

• dots2k — Dev Environment
• nvim2k — Personalized Editor
• sway2k — Desktop Environment
• qute2k — Personalized Browser

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