prettycrontab VS notes

A bunch of shell scripts I've written over the years are available from https://git.marcofontani.it/mfontani/scripts

Very useful ones:

- evenodd, to colorize the background of lines of text so it's easier to see which start of text corresponds to which end of text

- time-rollup, to time the time it takes to run a given command and provide percentage-based statistics on the execution

- a wrapper around "jq" to make it DWIM w/regards to gzipped, bzipped, and zstd-compressed files

I've also put some full-fledged binaries on github:

- https://github.com/mfontani/prettycrontab which is a crontab pretty-printer which parses a possibly specially commented crontab to give you an overview of what's coming up next

- https://github.com/mfontani/tstdin to timestamp your stdin, and provide when the line was received, how long it was since the start of the command, and how long it was since the last line was received. Useful to add at the end of a pipe to both log and perform analysis on the output and time it took to do stuff

- https://github.com/mfontani/rofixec to "sorta template" a rofi (a X11 runner) runner so it picks commands from a given list (provided as yaml or json configuration) and executes the picked item in a background job

- https://github.com/mfontani/git-recent which helps you pick the most recent branches you've worked on, very useful when paired with fzf for picking

- https://github.com/mfontani/los-opinionated-git-tools instead contains a ton of useful little git-related scripts, from one which DWIMs the master/main/blead branch name to one which helps you reauthor the last commit, to one (git-rr) which helps you perform a git rebase with context info about the commits you're rebasing: which files they touched, etc - to make it easier to fixup together commits which touched the same file... which is an operation I do so often I've created a "git-fixup" script, which automates fixing up the currently committed file to the last commit which touched that file in the branch

I've been doing something similar for ~20 years at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

    - Running `notes` will open this month's notes for YYYY_MM.txt

I use a very command line focused approach with https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Since about 2001 I used YYYY-MM.txt plain text files and have a shell script to help create notes in the most friendly way I could think of from the command line at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details. I still use it today.

But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kubernetes, Kustomize / Helm, EKS, various cloud hosting details (networking, etc.), Terraform and ton of super useful commands / context. Details you for sure want recorded for later.

For this type of info I've been building up a knowledge base with https://obsidian.md/. It's really nice and I highly recommend it. It's been working well for keeping things reasonably categorized without wasting a lot of time on the details around keeping links and tags up to date. It also has Vim mode that's good enough where day to day writing feels natural.

Did you end up automating the entries?

For example, I have a command line note taking script at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

It creates a YYYY-MM-DD.txt file and doesn't include time stamps but it would be a 1 line change to make each entry get timestamped. I didn't do that because personally I'm more interested in monthly notes not per minute.

But I do think removing the barrier of creating entries is an important step with jotting things down, this way you can focus on what you want to write and not the boilerplate.

A whole bunch of little things, mainly command line tools.

Most of them are open source and also have extensive documentation and a screencast video going over them.

In no specific order:

- https://github.com/nickjj/notes

- https://github.com/nickjj/invoice

- https://github.com/nickjj/wait-until

And a few recent little scripts to solve specific things:

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-ffmpeg-to-get-an-mp3s-d...

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-shell-script-to-keep-a-bunc...

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/bash-aliases-to-prepare-recor...

Along similar lines, nickjj also has a similar (but bash) notes script at:

https://github.com/nickjj/notes

While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/

It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too.

Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid.

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes