VimNote - a vim-based TUI notetaking application

Install

VimNote is a Python 3.11 application, so it can be installed with pip install vimnote (or pip3 if necessary). You will also need Vim installed.

Getting started

Run VimNote from the terminal, optionally specifying the name of a book to open. In bash, book names can be autocompleted with tab.

Interface

There are three main "views" in VimNote:

• book view
• note view
• edit view

Edit view is essentially just a Vim instance, while book and note views are lists of books and notes respectively which can be navigated with j and k. Other keybinds for book and note view are as follows:

key	what it does
enter	opens the selected book or note
n	creates a new book or note, then opens it
r	renames the selected book or note
d	prompts to delete the selected book or note
/	starts searching notes or books
esc, b	goes back to the previous view
p	opens a preview of the selected book or note on the bottom half of the terminal
g	goes to the top of the list
G	goes to the bottom of the list
q, ^C, ^D	quits VimNote

Book and note views both have some analytics about each entry. From left to right, this is:

• book view
  • book name (the majority of the width)
  • number of notes
  • date and time that the last note in the book was edited
• note view
  • note title (the majority of the width)
  • number of lines
  • date and time that the note was last edited

Any of these can be used for sorting by with the F-keys they are labelled with, toggling between ascending and descending. By default, notes and books are ordered by the most recently edited.

Config

vimrc

While most of the config happens in ~/.config/vimnote (see below), you can change how Vim sees VimNote files for syntax highlighting and indenting rules in your vimrc. To do this, add the following line to your vimrc:

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.vmnt set filetype=your_filetype_here

where your_filetype_here is a valid Vim filetype. For a list of filetypes, type :setfiletype (with a space at the end) in Vim and hit tab, or if you have a file whose type you want to use, run :set filetype (with a space in between) while editing that file. I use markdown but you can use whatever you'd like, or even make your own.

~/.config/vimnote

The config file for VimNote is ~/.config/vimnote. The default is shown below:

previewratio = 0.5              # the amount of the terminal that the preview uses
confirmdelete = true            # whether or not to ask before deleting
notedir = ~/.vimnote/           # where vimnote books and notes are stored
dateformat = %I:%M%p %m-%d-%Y   # see https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior
defaultsortcol = 2              # the default column to sort by, zero-indexed
defaultsortascending = true     # whether to sort the above column ascending or descending (true or false)