nural

nural is a fast, minimal, and context aware CLI note tool

nural is designed to deal with all the common pain points of CLI note tools; high cognitive load, cumbersome note access, and a cluttered note store. With nural, notes are scoped to directories (called "contexts"), meaning notes are only visible where they're relevant. In addition, all commands do their best to infer your intent, despite partial or even missing information.

Quickstart

To set up a note context run nural init in your project root. This context spans all child directories of your project root.

You can use exact note names in commands

nural create todo
nural append "example text" todo

You can also use partial note names. The below example will first check for a note named "to", and fall back to a fuzzy match. If there are multiple notes that match (e.g. "todo" and "stores") it will open a search in the TUI where you can select a note by typing, using the arrow keys, and pressing enter

nural open to

You can also completely leave out the note name to directly open the search UI and select a note

nural read

All commands have aliases (visible in their help messages). This, in combination with partial note name parsing, lets you access notes with minimal input and thought. For example, the below command would append the example text to the end of the newly created todo note

nural c todo
nural a "Update readme" to

Installation

Currently, the only methods of installation are cargo or building the source yourself.

1. cargo install nural
2. ensure ~/.cargo/bin is in your system path.
3. (optional) add an alias for nural, e.g. alias n=nural

Platforms

nural is currently primarily built and tested on Linux. Windows is supported, but at the moment requires additional configuration from the default Linux commands. In a future update the reader and lister commands will be replaced by built in functionality.

You can run nural config to print the config location for your platform.

Setup

Following installation and a dry run of nural from the terminal to generate files, you can make some configuration tweaks.

• The note_extension setting lets you change your preferred note file extension, I would recommend leaving this default at .md.
• The editor setting is the command to be run to open notes. Default is nano.
• The reader setting is the command to be run to print notes to the terminal. Default is cat.
• The lister setting is the command to be run to print all available notes to the terminal. Default is tree.

All other settings in the config are currently unimplemented.

Future Plans

I'm planning to continue development and implement more features

• Different storage modes (stored in project folder vs inside nural installation folder)
• Metadata for notes to allow more intelligent CLI parsing, e.g commands automatically selecting the MRU note
• Piping text into append command
• Global flag to access a more traditional global note store

Suggestions

I'm eager for feedback and feature requests, just open an issue or reach out directly if you like the tool but wish it had something.