Quickref is a simple CLI tool for interacting with a set of notes files. Use it to search for keywords by topic, and also to append lines of notes to the files.

setup

It is currently just a single python file, which I use by including #!/usr/local/bin/python, and defining alias qr="/path/to/quickref.py", because I like terse commands.

Define the environment variable QR_DATA_DIR, which should be a path containing text files, each named according to its topic, topic.txt.

Optionally, make sure your EDITOR environment variable is up to date, and qr will check that if you use the qr edit command.

install script

mkdir -p $HOME/code/py
mkdir -p $HOME/cmd
mkdir -p $HOME/qr
git clone https://github.com/alanbernstein/quickref $HOME/code/py/quickref/
ln -s $HOME/code/py/quickref/quickref.py $HOME/cmd/qr # softlink version
# alias qr='$HOME/code/py/quickref/quickref.py # alias version

export QR_DATA_DIR="$HOME/qr"
git clone https://github.com/alanbernstein/cheatsheets $QR_DATA_DIR

usage

Topic files are simple, line-based note snippets. The power of this tool is in creating these files yourself, one line at a time, and including the keywords that you are likely to remember yourself. Some examples are included (they are just reference tables translated to plaintext format).

$ qr show available quickref files (in $QR_DATA_DIR)

$ qr topic show all lines from $QR_DATA_DIR/topic.txt or $QR_DATA_DIR/path/topic.txt

a "topic" can be anything, but generally something like a language (py), application (blender), library/framework (django), command (git). also things like audio, pdf manipulation, CLI image editing.

$ qr topic pattern show all lines from $QR_DATA_DIR/*/topic.txt matching regex pattern

$ qr path/topic pattern show all lines from $QR_DATA_DIR/path/topic.txt matching regex pattern, omitting files from other subdirectories with matching names

$ qr topic term1 term2 ... show all lines from $QR_DATA_DIR/topic.txt matching all terms

$ qr add topic "line with spaces" add "line with spaces" to topic.txt

$ qr edit [topic1 [topic2 ...]] open specified topics in $EDITOR

$ qr alias topic shortcut create a new alias 'shortcut' for the topic 'topic' (not yet implemented)