bote is a notetaking and note management utility written in the fish shell.

It implements functionality for editing, removing, moving, organizing, backuping up, and (re)arranging notes.

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Dependencies

• fish 3.0
• gnucoreutils
• pandoc
• wkhtmltopdf
• scdoc (!only for compiling the manpage!)

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The note storage system and its guidelines

• All of the notes are stored in a base "root" directory on the filesystem, hereinafter reffered to as the "rootdir". By default it is $HOME/notes.
• All of the notes:
  • are represented as regular files on the filesystem
  • are written in standard Markdown
  • always use the .md file extensions
• Notes may be nested (categorized) infinitely-deep inside of directories residing recursively inside the "rootdir". Every directory recursively inside of the "rootdir" represents a category.
• Every category (a directory recursively inside of the "rootdir") must inside of it contain a directory named "pdf" which represents a storepoint for any and all notes in the parent category (directory), even if the category contains no notes
• Any note must always be associated with an existing ".pdf" file inside of the child "pdf" directory and shouldn't exist without one.
• Any PDF file must always be associated with an existing ".md" file inside of the parent category (directory) and shouldn't exist without one.
• Should any note be deleted by the user or the script, its associated PDF file must be deleted as well.
• Storepoints for formats other than PDF are permitted (but none are currently implemented by the script)

Usage

For a comprehensive description of the utility and all of its functionality, see the manpage (bote(1)).

Installation

1. Clone the repository
2. Copy the main executable to a location inside your $PATH, e.g. $ cp ./bote /usr/local/bin

You'll probably also want to set the environment variables BOTE_EDITOR_CMDLINE and BOTE_PDF_CMDLINE to set your default text editor and PDF viewer.

NOTE: Due to the current limitations of the fish shell, the environment variables BOTE_PDF_CMDLINE and BOTE_EDITOR_CMDLINE may not contain spaces inside of individual arguments.

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Completions

bote comes with Tab interactive completions for fish. It's able to complete note/category names as well as all of the flags and their respective options.

1. Run $ cp completions/bote.fish ~/.config/fish/completions to install the completions
2. Reload fish

Manpage

To compile and install the manpage:

1. Run $ scdoc < ./scdoc_man > /usr/local/man/man8/bote.1 && gzip /usr/local/man/man8/bote.1

TODO

• ❌ Implement remote backup and restore functionality via Google Drive
• ✔️ Implement the option for overriding the editor as well as the PDF reader (thus removing 2 potentially unnecessary dependencies)
• ✔️ Implement interactive Tab completions
• ✔️ Create a manpage with included usage examples
• ✔️ Implement local backup and restore functionality