Handy shell alias for taking notes

I keep my personal nodes in a bunch of Markdown files inside a Dropbox folder. I’ve used just about every note-taking app there is and ended up settling on this system. It’s served me really well so far.

I have one note at the top level called scratch.md that I use for quickly writing things down when I’m in a hurry. I decided to speed this up even more with this little shell alias:

# Should work fine in bash or zsh
n() {
    nf="$HOME/Dropbox/Notes/scratch.md"

    date +'%n## %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' >> $nf
    nano +999999 $nf
}

I have that in my .zshrc (would work fine in .bashrc too), then when I’m in a terminal (I’m always in a terminal) I can just run n and it will add a new line with the current timestamp as a heading (## 2017-10-18 22:54:23) and open nano with the cursor at the bottom ready to type.

That’s right I use nano. Come at me, emacs and vim people.