🚀 Shell Velocity

A portable notational velocity for your shell written in POSIX shell.

demo.mp4

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Table of Contents

• Features
• Dependencies
• Installation
  • Arch Linux (AUR)
  • Manual
• Usage
• Philosophy

Features

• Removes cognitive load by combining the note creation and note searching

• Customizable (use your preferred fuzzy finder or file picker; see tested pickers)

• Uses whatever editor you want (even Visual Studio Code)

• Portable (runs on every POSIX compatible OS, see Tested OSes)

• Minimal (only a POSIX shell and the picker of your choice)

• Nonintrusive (use markdown by default, but works also with your preferred markup languages such as: org, neorg, rst, adoc, etc)

Dependencies

• POSIX compliant shell

• POSIX utils

• fzf or your favorite picker (e.g. fzy, rofi, dmenu, etc)

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S shell-velocity-git

Manual

Important

Make sure that ~/.local/bin is in your PATH.

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/saccarosium/shell-velocity/main/shv -o ~/.local/bin/shv
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/shv

Usage

The first design goal of this script is to make creating and searching notes as frictionless as possible. First you run shv without subcommands. You will be presented with a grep search of all your notes. Search for what you where looking for and if you don’t find it you simply press enter and a new note will be created by your query.

Note	For more commands and information run shv help

Philosophy

The reasoning behind Notational Velocity’s present lack of multi-database support is that storing notes in separate databases would 1) Require the same kinds of decisions that category/folder-based organizers force upon their users (e.g., "Is this note going to be work-specific or home-specific?"), and 2) Defeat the point of instantaneous searching by requiring, ultimately, the user to repeat each search for every database in use.

— scrod creator of notational_velocity

By providing a default directory, we offer (one) fix to the first issue.

By searching the whole set of directories simultaneously, we handle the second.

It also handles Notational Velocity’s issue with multiple databases. UNIX does not allow repeated filenames in the same folder, but often the parent folder provides context, like in workout/TODO.md and coding/TODO.md.