booknotes

A command-line utility for parsing book notes.

Usage

Usage:
------
booknotes <command> [file]

Commands:
---------
list      Prints title, subtitle, author, and metadata for each book
full      Same as "list" but includes the full notes, too
authors   Prints all authors in alphabetical order
titles    Prints all titles in alphabetical order
words     Prints words and word counts
random    Prints a random note
help      Prints this help message

Options:
--------
file      Optional file path to process instead of all books

Environment Variables:
----------------------
BOOKNOTES_DIRECTORY        Path to directory containing book note files
BOOKNOTES_MAX_LINE_LENGTH  Maximum number of columns when printing notes

Conventions

Book notes / highlights must be stored in a single text file per book with a specific format. For example, the file the_signal_and_the_noise.txt:

===========================================
The Signal and the Noise
Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don't
by Nate Silver
===========================================

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that
cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes
wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair," wrote Douglas
Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.37

In complex systems, however, mistakes are not measured in degrees but in whole
orders of magnitude.

If our ideas are worthwhile, we ought to be willing to test them by establishing
falsifiable hypotheses and subjecting them to a prediction.

The format must follow these conventions:

1. The header section is surrounded by rows of "=" characters.
2. The first content line of the header is the book's title.
3. The second line is the book's subtitle. This line can be omitted.
4. The last content line of the header is the author and should be of the form "by ".
5. The header section is followed by a blank line before the notes/highlights start.
6. Each note/highlight should be either in a single line or on multiple adjacent lines.
7. Each note/highlight should be separated by a blank line.

Why did you make this?

I have a fair number of book notes and highlights organized as plain text files and wanted a way to parse them for metadata, pull out random notes, etc. And I needed a project to try out the Go programming language.