Notetime

Notetime is a Markdown-based lightweight note-taking tool.

Features

• Always-published notes
• Note tagging
• Timeline creation
• Integration with GitBooks

Example

This note body

; title NYC Subway opens
; tags policy
; date October 27, 1904

The IRT opened on this date.

produces this output in README.md and tags/policy.md

NYC Subway opens

The IRT opened on this date.

• Date: October 27, 1904
• Tags: policy

Command-Line Utilities

note-new

Opens a blank file in vi at notes/2018-07-29-14-54-00.md (or whatever notes path you have configured in your config.json).

note-deploy

Cleans all generated directories (tags/ and timelines), builds your notes, adds all notes and generated directories to git, makes a new commit, and pushes the commit to your remote.

note-open <text string to search for>

Opens the note that includes the text string to search for. If it is found in more than one file, script will fail and list out all matching files.

Configuration

A notebook is configured using config.json, like the following example.

{
  "title": "Urban History",
  "description": "A notebook's description",
  "timelines": [
    "fare-increases",
    "expansion"
  ],
  "publications": {
    "nyt": "The New York Times",
  }
}

Anatomy of a Note

Every line in a note must either contain a keyword or it becomes part of the note body.

Keywords

A note is composed of a series of keywords and a note body. All keywords should be used on their own line and prefaced with a semicolon. For example:

; title A Note's Title

Keyword	Description
title <title>	The note's title
tags <tag> <tag> <tag> ...	A space-separated list of tags
date <date>
source <source-id> <source-url>
*-source-id <source-id>
*-source-title <source-title>
*-source-date <date>
*-source-url <url>
*-source-publication <publication>
*-source-author <author>
*-source-pages <pages>
*-source-institution <institution>

Unrecognized keywords are ignored when building a note.

Note Body

All lines in a note which are not prefaced with a semicolon are treated as the note body and should be written in Markdown.

Sources

The following formats of sources are supported.

• "Title," Publication, Date. link
• Author, "Title," Publication, Date. link
• "Title," Institution, Date. link
• Author, "Title", Date, ppPages.
• id

Simple vs Complex Sources

Simple sources are recommended for quick saving of links. Complex sources are recommended to create citations.

A simple source has the format

; source <id> <url>

A complex source has the format

; 1-source-id <id>
; 1-source-url <url>
; 1-source-title <title>
...

and can be any of the <integer-identifier>-source-* tags in the table above.

Timelines

A timeline is a list of notes of a particular tag sorted by date. Notetime will attempt to sort a note using the following fall-through logic:

1. The date tag, if one exists.
2. The *-source-date, if a single complex source exists for that note.
3. If neither of these are found, the note will go into an Undated Notes at the bottom of the timeline.

If your notes tend to have multiple complex sources with dates, they must use a date tag to be properly sorted in a timeline.