Jot

Put simply, Jot is a little console app for jotting down notes while in the shell.

In a few more words, Jot is a lightweight, command-line, note manager built with Python and SQLite, offering Git-like commands and methods for de-centralized synchronization, while providing all the expected features of a note manager, plus a few new ones.

Installation

Using Jot requires a Python interpreter (preferably between 2.5 and 2.7). It's been tested on OSX 10.6.7 and Ubuntu 10.10, though it will probably work on most *nixes.

To install, clone the repo and run the setup.py:

$ git clone https://github.com/ndreynolds/jot
$ python setup.py

This might fail if the account you're using doesn't have write access to the default install path, /user/local/bin. You can run the command as root or you can use the --path flag and supply another path. Maybe something like this:

$ python setup.py --path ~/bin

Getting Started

The command structure of Jot is very similar to Git's. You won't be managing any repositories, but much of it is the same.

To add a new note:

$ jot add

This opens a text editor--if available, the one specified in your shells $EDITOR variable--with a temp file. If you save the file, Jot captures its contents and saves the text in its database. Just like a commit message in Git, if you quit without saving, it aborts.

To show recent notes:

$ jot show

This command shows the last 5 notes. Of course, if you have fewer that 5, it will only show those.

Jot's notes are identified by MD5 hashes. You can always use this identifier to reference a note with commands that accept a reference (edit,show,tag,remove). Jot also supports a number of keywords like last, last^, and all. See the documentation for more info.

We can then edit the last note with either of the below:

$ jot edit last
$ jot edit [identifier]

You can search your notes for keywords or phrases with the search command. To search for the word 'meeting':

$ jot search meeting

Phrases that include spaces are possible too, just quote them so your shell doesn't get confused:

$ jot search "My dog skip"

If you have Jot installed on multiple machines, you can easily synchronize them. The docs cover this in depth, but here are a few quick commands:

$ jot pull ndreynolds@ndreynolds.com
$ jot push ndreynolds@ndreynolds.com
$ jot clone ndreynolds@ndreynolds.com

See the full documentation (doc/jot.txt) for way more options.