stup - a shell tool for daily notes

Over the past few years I've been participating in Stand-up meetings and it took me some time to find a convenient and effective way for keeping notes about what I was doing every day.

I needed to be able to:

• keep categorized notes on the issues I worked on, the meetings I participated in and stuff that blocked my work etc
• easily access these notes based on their date
• have an overview of what I did for example the last week
• all of the above:
  • from inside a terminal
  • with the notes strictly bound to the date they are taken
  • without having to manually structure and update a single document
  • without having to manually create a document for each day

stup

I made this tool which actually is a bash script and I named it stup from the term stand-up.

You can find the project on GitHub here.

Usage examples

Below are some examples showing the most important features of stup.

Adding notes

# Adding a note to the default category at current date
stup add -n "Worked on issue #ABC123"

# Adding a note to the default category setting the current date explicitly
stup add today -n "Worked on issue #ABC123"

# Adding a note to the meetings category
stup add today -c "meetings" -n "2 hours with @phoebe for the project kick off"

# Adding a note to the blocking category for April 10th, 2020
stup add @ 2020-04-10 -c "blocking" -n "connectivity issues"

Showing notes

# Showing yesterday's notes
$ stup

# Showing yesterday's notes explicitly setting the date
$ stup yesterday

# Showing today's notes
$ stup today

# Showing notes on a specific date
$ stup show @ 2020-04-18

# Showing notes on a specific date for the meetings category
$ stup show @ 2020-04-18 -c "meetings"

Retrieving all notes for a period of time

# List current week's notes
stup log week

# List current week's notes skipping command's literal
stup week

# List previous week's notes
stup log previous-week

# List notes between January 20th, 2020 and March 2nd, 2020
stup log --from 2020-01-20 --to 2020-03-02

# List meeting notes between January 20th, 2020 and March 2nd, 2020
stup log --from 2020-01-20 --to 2020-03-02 -c "meetings"

Behind the scenes

Notes are organized in categories.

When a new note is added, stup creates a markdown file and places it under the category's directory in a sub-directory with a path based on the date.

CATEGORIES_ROOT_DIRECTORY/CATEGORY/YEAR/MONTH/YYYY-MM-DD.md

# For example, the notes of a category named "programming" April 18th, 2020 are saved under
CATEGORIES_ROOT_DIRECTORY/programming/2020/04/2020-04-18.md

This allows users to retrieve any notes added on a specific date or in a specific period for a specific or for all categories.

# Fetch notes for all categories
$ stup show @ 2020-04-18

# Fetch notes for a specific category for previous week
$ stup log previous-week -c programming

# Fetch notes for all categories for a specific period
$ stup log --from 2020-04-01 --to 2020-04-15

You can find the full documentation with usage examples on the project's repository and more information about features to be added in the project's GitHub issues page.

Comments

[Jason C. McDonald]

This is really neat. Well done!

[Lazarus Lazaridis]

Thank you!

[J3ffJessie]

This is awesome. Really nice job. I’ll be setting this up for sure. Will help me keep track of what I have going on with my code and projects.

[Lazarus Lazaridis]

Thank you, I hope you find it useful

[Fred Heath]

That's very useful! It removes dependency on desktop/web apps for simple note taking and I can have this running on both my Linux and MacOS machines. Thank you!

[Lazarus Lazaridis]

Thank you Fred!

[Rafael Acioly]

Love it!

[Lazarus Lazaridis]

Thank you!

[Kamilla Holanda Crozara]

Awesome!

[Lazarus Lazaridis]

Thank you!

[Spencer Tweedy]

This is really cool. I'm currently working on a Rails app that does some similar things!

[Lazarus Lazaridis]

Thank you

[Tom Granot]

Very, very dope. I keep a text file with hashtags and dates so I can cmd+f through them, but that's about as far as I got. This is on a whole other level.... great job!