Tiro

Tiro is a very simple note-taking TUI ("text-based user interface"). It was named after Marcus Tullius Tiro (died 4 BC), famous secretary of Cicero.

Use case

Tiro is meant for taking a quick note in a terminal session.

In the past, whenever I needed to jot something down - say, a phone number, for instance - my go-to solutions were the following. Either I would switch to a browser and open Google Docs, which means leaving the terminal environment and some clicks to create a new document. Or, I would fire up my terminal-based editor of choice, which is Neovim, which is quicker, but did leave me with the annoying task of picking a file name and a location to save the file to. A file, by the way, that I would then forget about and would have trouble relocating afterwards.

With tiro I now have a tool that allows me to start writing a note with one quick terminal command. In my .bashrc the instruction tn is an alias for tiro tui take, which creates a new note:

Functionality

As said, tiro is really a very basic application. Besides simple CRUD ("Create Update Delete") functionality, it also offers a way to browse notes and filter them with fuzzy searching:

The application also comes with basic "help" functionality:

Architecture

Under the hood, tiro is a Go application that exposes both a TUI and a CLI. Both use the same API for creating/updating, reading and deleting notes, which uses SQLite as a database back-end.

The CLI is made with the Cobra framework:

  _   _
 | |_(_)_ __ ___
 | __| | '__/ _ \
 | |_| | | | (_) |
  \__|_|_|  \___/

tiro is a CLI application for note taking

Usage:
  tiro [command]

Available Commands:
  about       Information about `tiro`
  arg         Alternative ways to start tiro
  command     Command functions
  completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
  delete      Delete a note
  help        Help about any command
  info        Note info
  read        Read a note
  take        Take a note
  tui         tiro TUI

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for tiro

Use "tiro [command] --help" for more information about a command.

For instance:

tiro take "hello world"
cat myfile.txt | tiro take

The TUI is made with the excellent Charm TUI toolkit. It's main components are the Bubble Tea library, which is for building and running the terminal app itself, and the Bubbles library, a collection of terminal UI components like text areas, list interfaces, and so on. A third library I made use of, is Lip Gloss which is a terminal style and layout toolkit.

The Charm TUI ecosystem is really good and accessible. Bubble Tea comes with a beginner-friendly tutorial and all of the libraries are well-documented. The Bubble libraries also offers example implementations of the different UI components, which is really handy.

Feedback

The tiro TUI/CLI is still very much in an alpha-stage, but I am very open to any feedback you might have on the project. Please open an issue or submit a pull-request!