hmm

hmm is a small command-line note taking app written in Rust. Notes are written in plain text and indexed by the time they were written.

hmm is inspired by jrnl, though with a slightly different use-case in mind.

Comparison to jrnl

Features jrnl has that hmm doesn't:

• Encryption of your notes.
• Ability to add note at arbitrary points in the past.
• In-built notion of "tags."
• In-built notion of "starring."
• Ability to edit entries.
• Ability to parse English dates/times, e.g. "yesterday" and "2 weeks ago."

Features hmm has that jrnl doesn't:

• Unambigous date-format.
• File-format optimised for searching by time.
• Ability to format entries however you want.
• No external dependencies, the hmm binary is standalone.

If any of the features jrnl has that hmm is missing are essential to your workflow, hmm isn't for you. That said, I am open to feature requests but very much plan to keep hmm focused on the use-case I designed it for: quick note taking in the terminal with the ability to search later.

Installation

I plan to upload hmm to various package repositories, but until then...

Using cargo

Install Rust, then run:

cargo install hmmcli

Now the hmm and hmmq binaries should be available in your terminal.

From source

Install Rust, install git then run:

git clone https://github.com/samwho/hmm
cd hmm
cargo install

Usage

hmm is split in to two binaries: hmm and hmmq. The former is writing entries, while the latter is for querying them.

Writing an entry from the CLI

hmm hello world

This will write an entry to the default .hmm file location, which is in your home directory.

Writing an entry to a different file

Your .hmm file can be located wherever you want, and named whatever you want.

hmm --path ~/.notes hello world

Writing long-form entries in your EDITOR

hmm

Invoked with no arguments, or just a --path argument, hmm will open your default EDITOR to compose an entry. Savings and quitting that editor will then write the note to your .hmm file. If you don't have an EDITOR configured, you can also pass one as a flag:

hmm --editor vim

Listing your entries

hmmq

By default, this lists all of your entries in a default format in ascending chronological order. This may not be desired, so there are a bunch of flags to narrow down what is shown.

Show the most recent 10 entries

hmmq --descending -n 10

Show entries on a specific day

hmmq --start 2020-01-01 --end 2020-01-02

The --start flag is inclusive and the --end flag is exclusive, so the above command will show all entries that were created on the 1st of January 2020.

Dates follow the RFC3339/ISO8601 format, allowing you to omit parts you don't need. All dates are in your local timezone.

Show entries on a given year

hmmq --start 2019 --end 2020

This will show all of your notes from 2019.

Show entries on a given year in descending order

hmmq --start 2019 --end 2020 --descending

This will show all of your notes from 2019 but in reverse chronological order.

Show all entries from a given date

hmmq --start 2020-02-20

This will print all of your notes from the 20th of February 2020.

Show a random entry

hmmq --random

Prints out a random entry. The randomness comes from selecting a random byte in your .hmm file, and as such longer entries are more likely to be picked. This is a trade-off. Picking entries in a truly random fashion would require reading the entire file, which is against the philosophy of hmmq.