Once you have your environment set up; your window manager patched exactly the way you want, same for your editor and even your kernel builds automated, then you either start from scratch and learn a whole lot more, or you start to focus on the really small details. The endless polishing that is bred of a mania for automation and customisation and the liberating freedom of using software that allows, and even encourages, this approach.

Since I started using a couple of basic functions for managing my note taking, I have been conscious of the way I can use this tool to make my workflow a little less onerous.

One of the things I find myself doing a lot is reusing the same snippets of text; either prose in work documents, or links to relevant articles on the Arch Wiki and Forums. It is simple enough to add this material to my ~/.notes, but retrieval has always been—for the text I reuse frequently—unwieldy.

How many times do you really want to open the file, search for the relevant excerpt, highlight it and then copy it to the system clipboard before closing the file and pasting it into your email or a web form? I must have logged several thousand before I finally decided to do something about it.

I now have a couple of different files in ~/.notes/ depending upon the context; the example I’ll use is the one for the Arch Forums kept, naturally enough, at $HOME/Sync/notes/arch (I symlink to ~/.notes so that the directory is synched using BitTorrent Sync).

This is just a simple text file with all of the links, guidance and wisdom that I generously share with those people, mostly new to the community, who have yet to embrace the opportunity to commit the Forum Etiquette to memory. The format of each file is the same and is pretty basic:

# rules sticky
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=130309

# smart questions
[url=http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]How To Ask Questions The Smart Way[/url]

# arch only
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Forum_Etiquette#Arch_Linux_Distribution_Support_ONLY

I use the commented title to identify the desired piece of text and then just copy it to the clipboard, ready to pasted into a post that will undoubtedly be gratefully received by the infractor:

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# board snippets
bbs() {
  file="$HOME/.notes/arch"
  if (( $# == 1 )); then
    local opt="$1"
    awk -v line="$opt" 'index($0, line) { getline; print }' "$file" | xsel -b
  else
    awk '/^# /' "$file"
  fi
}

So, on the rare occasion that I need to remind someone that on the Arch boards we only support Arch Linux (I know, quite the revelation…), I just open a scratchpad and enter bbs only and then Shift+Insert the text into the post and I am done. Not passing an argument just prints the commented titles in the file in the event that I forget what the damn thing is called.

I have a similar setup for work, with a couple of files that feature longer pieces of text that I find myself reusing for proposals, email responses and other administrivia. It’s a simple enough approach, but it works well and does lend a certain satisfaction to the otherwise tedious business of writing boilerplate.

Notes

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