qn - Quick Notes

Note management application that doesn't impose strict formats or requirements. qn defines a note to be any file within the configured notes directory. While text files with any syntax are preferred, you can put any type of file and qn will open it via rifle or xdg-open. Fancy functionalities are kept to a minimum, and no per-file metadata is ever created. The only application data created is kept in a .qn directory inside the notes directory--it can be deleted at any time without losing data (except trashed notes).

There are currently two interfaces for the underlying functionalites, one built on top of rofi, and the other built on top of fzf. However, I'd like to make it easy to switch the underlying applications.

This application is naive and simple by design, but I do intend to implement a few niceties.

Note On syncing: This is left to the user for now. I use syncthing and have been doing so for the past year--it works beautifuly. Personally, I keep a syncthing folder almost exclusively for qn...this makes it very portable and I can even sync it to devices with very little storage.

Features

• rofi or fzf(cli) interfaces
  • Quickly filter notes
  • Open/Create/Delete/Rename Notes
  • Nondestructive. Deleted files are moved to a trash directory, and conflicts are stored (with suffixes).
  • Quickly grep files (e.g., type a query in qnr, and press alt-s)
  • qnf works beautifully on android using Termux. It still requires the right python libraries, fzf and an editor like neovim.

Dependencies

• rofi for qnr
• fzf for qnf
• python3-configargparse
• rifle (from ranger file manager--if not installed xdg-open will be used)
• python3-pip -- to install. Not a hard requirement, but it's the easy way to get qn up and running.

Todo

• Make this app a bit more user friendly.
  • Make a better presentation of this tool.
• Implement CLI (Very low priority, fzf is close enough).
• Implement way to permanently delete notes in the trash.
• Tags -- they were implemented in a previous incarnation of qn. I prefer to keep the name informative rather than rely on tags (very low priority).
• Clean up configuration.

Installation via local pip

Note: qn is not in the python repos, so pip won't find it. We are using pip here because it affords us better ability to uninstall qn cleanly. easy_install also works.

1. Run git clone https://github.com/mbfraga/qn

2. Go to qn directory. cd qn

3. Run sudo pip3 install ./

4. Copy /etc/qn/config.example to ~/.config/qn/config. cp /etc/qn/config.example ~/.config/qn/config

Upgrade via pip

1. Go to qn directory
2. Run git pull
3. Run sudo pip3 install ./ --upgrade

Set up without pip

You can set up qn without pip. Running qnr or qnf from the bin/ directory in the repo will work. You can create symlinks if you prefer this type of local install.

An example setup would be as follows:

1. We will set it up in ~/opt and put launchers in ~/bin. Make sure ~/bin is in your $PATH

2. Go to ~/opt. cd ~/opt

3. Clone qn. git clone https://github.com/mbfraga/qn

4. Create symlinks for the qnr and qnf executables.

   ln -s ~/opt/qn/bin/qnr ~/bin/
   ln -s ~/opt/qn/bin/qnf ~/bin/

5. Create config directory. mkdir ~/.config/qn

6. Copy the config file. cp config.example ~/.config/qn/config

Misc Notes

• Termux setup:

  • Only qnf will work.

  • termux doesn't have xdg-mime, so python's mimetypes is used. Python's mimetypes is not very reliable on some types of files. Text-based files should be ok.

  • termux doesn't have /etc, so while pip will work, it will not want to install the default config file. Copy it directly from the repo to your $XDG_HOME_CONFIG.