archiver

A Python3 script to write down daily notes in an organized manner.

Introduction

This python3 script was born from a friend's need to have an app that takes in his daily notes directly from a terminal and organizes it for you. We had different ideas on how to create this app, and this python script is my approach.

When invoking the archiver, it will automatically open your preferred editor (nano, vim, or whatever else) and save your input into an organized .tex file, in a folder of your preference. Then, if you want, the script will generate a compilable .tex file with all your daily entries in the folder and compile it with pdflatex.

The folder wherein to store your entries, to store the .tex and .pdf files, as well as the author's name and preferred editor, are stored in the archiver.config file, which is generated automatically for you when using the script for the first time. The final .tex file is generated based on the preamble.tex file, which you can customize as you want.

archiver.config

The archiver.config should look like below. Please use absolute paths of directories, and create them before using the script; it will not generate folders automatically.

Directory to store entries: /home/<user>/<save_directory>
Directory to tex file: /home/<user>/<tex_directory>
Author name: <author>
Title: <title>
Preferred editor: nano

The script will look for the archiver.config file in the directory it is stored. If the config file is not present, the script will open nano and allow you to fill in the required fields.

LaTeX template

A preamble.tex contains the usual LaTeX preamble that I use for my notes. It is customizable to what you want. Just make sure that it contains only style and general type-setting commands; the author, title and date information, as well as the document's begin and end points, are added by the script.

The template I like using for my notes is very minimalistic, as shown in the images. My notes are called Eclíptica, but you can specify your title and author name in the archiver.config file. The year is set automatically.

Pre-requisites

The python3 script is based mainly on built-in libraries, but it requires the installation of the glob library. The way I like to install python3 packages is via pip

pip3 install -U glob

It also requires a bunch of LaTeX packages, which are probably installed by the distribution you already have. Otherwise, you can install tex-live's full scheme, which is always what I do.

Installation

To run the script from anywhere in your terminal, you can add a symbolic link of the archive.sh bash script to your /usr/bin folder.

First, open your archive.sh bash script. It looks like this

#!/bin/bash
cd <installation_folder>
python3 ./archiver.py

Change <installation_folder> to the folder into which you copied archiver.py.

Create a symbolic link of archiver.sh to /usr/bin as

ln -s <installation_folder/archive.sh> /usr/bin/archiver