meowpad is a command-line scratchpad designed for capturing links and notes.
I often find myself recording a number of links for things I'm researching (or
just find interesting to read about) which I want to record and group together
but don't necessarily rise to the level of something worth sharing publicly.
My solution has always been to drop this in a text file or scratch entry in my notes application called something like "linkdump" or "scratch" (at some point, my "scratch" note got renamed to "meow"). This works, sort of: I have a record of what I was reading, but I've often lost the context of when I was reading it, why, and what's interesting about it, and as dozens or hundreds of notes accumulate, they become increasingly useless as anything but a write-only log.
meowpad is an attempt to put some structure on these sort of scratchpad notes,
revolving around my particular workflows. Its biggest inspiration is the Python
bookmark manager buku.
Suppose you are working on a command-line scratchpad designed for capturing links and notes. You are trying to find a well-supported Readability library. Fortunately someone has done a bake-off recently and blogged about it!
meowpad add https://emschwartz.me/comparing-13-rust-crates-for-extracting-text-from-html/ \
-t rust -t readability -t project:meowpad \
-m "Text extraction shootout; the recommended projects are fast_html2md and dom_smoothie"
rust, readability, and project:meowpad are tags for that link. If later
you want to mention other projects discussed in the link, fire up $VISUAL
with:
meowpad note https://emschwartz.me/comparing-13-rust-crates-for-extracting-text-from-html/
Maybe the RSS feed project mentioned by the author of that blog sounds interesting?
meowpad add https://scour.ing/about -t rss \
--related-link https://emschwartz.me/comparing-13-rust-crates-for-extracting-text-from-html/ \
--relation via
meowpad is not meant to be either a web-based bookmarks manager such as
Pinboard or Shiori or a read-later application such as Wallabag. It isn't meant
to record full web pages, the way ArchiveBox or
monolith do, although finding clean
mechanisms for handing scratch links off to those sorts of tools is absolutely
within scope. Nor is meowpad meant to be a general-purpose mind mapper tool;
it is not meant to provide anything like the feature set of
Obsidian. (Exporting to Obsidian vaults, however, is
within scope.)