vogonnote

README

vogonnote

A simple note searching CLI utility

Introduction

vogonnote is a simple note searching utility. You as a user maintain a directory with note files, where each note file is a text file with one or more notes. You use vogonnote to search for a phrase in the notes.

Currently vogonnote only works on Linux. I developed and tested it on Ubuntu 22.04.

Configuration

The configuration is in ~/.vogonnote.cfg. It is in TOML format and has the following structure:

rootdir = "/home/someuser/vogonnote.dir"
notefilepattern = ".*\\.note"

• rootdir is the root directory of the directory tree in which you keep your notes.
• notefilepattern is the file pattern that vogonnote uses to find all note files.

In the above configuration, all notes are in ~/vogonnote.dir. Note files are all files with the extension .note.

Notes

I wrote vogonnote with the idea that it will be used for a long time (years, really). So you use it by creating a root directory and add any subdirectories to structure the notes in any way meaningful to you. One simple way is to have one directory for each year, e.g 2024, 2025 and so on. vogonnote will look for note files in the root directory of the note tree and all subdirectories.

Every note in a note file has a very simple structure: one line for date and then one or more lines for the text. For example:

2024-11-16
Today I created this wonderful utility that will conquer the world!
It will show everyone how smart... 
Never mind!

2024-11-17
It's no good. I put great hopes on it, but now I
am having my doubts.

The date line is in the format year-month-day, so 2024-11-17 means "November 17, 20024".

Assuming that the configuration file is as in the example above and you created this note file within the note directory tree and named it with .note extension, vogonnote will find it.

Then if you search for "utility" like this:

vogonnote -key utility

it will report something like this:

-------------------
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
Text:
Today I created this wonderful utility that will conquer the world!
It will show everyone how smart... 
Never mind!
-------------------

How vogonnote works

It will never change the notes in any way. It just reads them, creates a search index and then searches for the user's key phrase in the index.

Originally, vogonnote used Bleve for search. Every time it was run, it would create an index in a temporary directory and before exiting deleted the index directory, so it wouldn't leave any traces behind.

However, I found this too slow. Creating that index every time the program is run turned out to be too slow. So, I switched to using a simple check for substrings, which works for my current needs. For the current size of notes, the run time went from 5s down to 6ms.

If I needed a smarter query, I could move back to Bleve and, instead of creating an index every time the program is run, I would check if there is any update in the notes, and only update the index if necessary. That would be more fun to code, but why do it if I don't need it?

This utility is something I wrote for myself. It is deliberately a small program that does one thing - searches for my notes - and hopefully does it well. For detailed steps of how I developed it, look at the directory steps.

Installing the code

go install github.com/ajanicij/vogonnote/

Building from source

In the root of the source tree, type

go build .

Usage

Type

vogonnote -h

and it displays the following helpful message:

vogonnote tool.
Copyright Aleksandar Janicijevic ajanicij@yahoo.com 2024 
Usage:
  -key string
    	Search pattern
  -verbose
    	Run in verbose mode