Run commands from outside a notebook directory

[mickael-menu]

There has been some discussions around the best way to manage a global notebook.

Declaring in the global configuration file a default notebook would go against the design of zk in my opinion. A notebook is like a Git repository, with a .zk marker similar to .git.

However, it could be interesting to specify from the command line the notebook where zk commands are run. There is a precedent with Git, which provides --git-dir and --work-tree.

I suggest specifying the path to the notebook with (in order of precedence):

• --notebook-dir <path>
• current working directory (or its parents)
• ZK_NOTEBOOK_DIR env variable

To simplify, any relative path provided as arguments would be relative to the notebook directory (when set explicitly), which allows stuff like:

$ zk list --exclude journal --notebook-dir ~/notes

In practice, that means that someone using a single notebook can set it as a "default global one" with ZK_NOTEBOOK_DIR in ~/.profile.

[megalithic]

Exactly this!