medi ✒️

`medi`, a speedy CLI driven Markdown manager

A fast, editor-centric, command-line notes manager.

medi is a simple and powerful tool for creating and managing your notes, articles, and documentation directly from the terminal. It's built for developers, writers, and anyone who loves the speed and focus of a command-line workflow.

Core Philosophy

medi is built on a few guiding principles:

CLI-first: Everything is done through the terminal. No GUIs or TUIs, no distractions.
Editor-centric: Your text editor ($EDITOR) is where you write. medi gets you there quickly and saves your work securely.
Local & private: All content is stored on your local machine in a high-performance embedded database. No cloud services, no network access.
Zero-config start: Install it and start writing immediately.

Features ✨

Speed: Instant access to any note, no matter how large your collection grows, thanks to an embedded database index.
Focused Workflow: A command-line hub for your writing. Create or edit notes from any directory without needing to cd first.
Flexible Input: Create notes in the way that suits your workflow:
- Interactively in your favorite editor for long-form content.
- Instantly with a one-liner using the -m flag for quick thoughts.
- Powerfully by piping from other commands for scripting.
Safe Deletion: An interactive confirmation prompt on delete prevents you from accidentally losing work.
Colorful & Clear Output: Uses colored output to clearly distinguish between success messages, information, warnings, and errors.

How It Works, DB as Source-of-Truth

medi uses a database-first approach. All your notes are stored in a sled key-value database, making access fast and reliable. This database is the single source of truth.

To version control your work with Git, medi provides a simple and deliberate workflow:

Write: Use medi new and medi edit to manage your notes.
Export: Run medi export ./my-notes to write all your notes to a local directory as .md files.
Commit: Use Git to commit the exported directory, giving you a complete, version-controlled snapshot of your work.

Installation

You need Rust and Cargo installed.

Installing from crates.io

The easiest way to install medi is to download it from crates.io. You can do it using the following command:

cargo install medi

If you want to update medi to the latest version, execute the following command:

medi update

Building from source

Alternatively you can build medi from source using Cargo:

git clone https://github.com/cladam/medi.git
cd medi
sudo cargo install --path . --root /usr/local

Configuration

On the first run, medi will automatically create a default configuration file at the standard location for your operating system:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/medi/config.toml
Linux: ~/.config/medi/config.toml
Windows: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\medi\config.toml

You can edit this file to customize medi's behaviour.

Example `config.toml`

# Path to the database file.
# You can change this to store your notes in a different location,
# for example, inside a cloud-synced folder like Dropbox.
db_path = "/Users/cladam/Library/Application Support/medi/medi_db"

# Default directory for the `medi export` command.
# If this is set, you can run `medi export` without specifying a path.
# Leave it as an empty string ("") if you don't want a default.
default_export_dir = "/Users/cladam/Documents/medi_backups"

Usage

Creating and Editing Notes

Create a new note

medi provides three ways to create a new note:

Interactively (default): Opens your default editor for long-form content.

medi new "my-long-article"
# With tags: Add tags to your note for better organisation.
medi new "my-long-article" --tag tag1 --tag tag2
# With a title: Specify a title for your note.
medi new "my-long-article" --title "My Long Article"

With a direct message: Perfect for quick, one-line notes.
```
medi new quick-idea -m "Remember to buy milk"
```
From a pipe: Use the output of other commands as your note content.
```
echo "This is a note from a pipe" | medi new piped-note
```

Edit an existing note

medi edit "my-long-article"

# Add tags to a note
medi edit "my-long-article" --add-tag tag1 --add-tag tag2

# Remove tags from a note
medi edit "my-long-article" --rm-tag tag1 --rm-tag tag2

Viewing and listing notes

Get a note's content Prints the note directly to the console. This is perfect for piping to other tools.

medi get "my-first-article"

# Pipe to a Markdown renderer like mdcat
medi get "my-first-article" | mdcat

# Get a note in Json format
medi get "my-first-article" --json

# Get one or several notes via a tag
medi get --tag my-tag

List all notes

The list command provides a rich overview of your notes, including their keys and tags.

medi list

Output:

Notes:
- medi-readme [#medi #README]
- tbdflow-readme [#tbdflow #README]
- tbdflow-gif-post [#blog]

Sort your notes

You can sort the list by creation or last modification date using the --sort-by flag. The default is to sort alphabetically by key.

# Sort by the most recently modified notes
medi list --sort-by modified

# Sort by when the notes were created
medi list --sort-by created

Searching & Indexing

medi includes a full-text search engine (tantivy) that lets you find notes by their content, title, or tags.

Search for a note

# Find all notes containing the word "rust"
medi search rust

# Search for a phrase
medi search "database design"

Output:

Search Results:
- medi-blogpost
- rust-cli-ideas

Rebuild the search index

If your search index ever gets out of sync or you're setting up medi for the first time with an existing database, you can rebuild the entire index.

medi reindex

Deleting a Note

Delete a note You will be prompted for confirmation.

medi delete "my-first-article"

# Skip the confirmation prompt
medi delete "my-first-article" --force

Versioning with Export/Import

Export all notes to a directory Creates a version-controllable snapshot of your database.
```
medi export ./my_notes_backup
cd my_notes_backup
tbdflow init
```
Export all notes to a Json document
```
medi export medi-export --format json
```
Export notes via a tag
```
medi export medi-export --tag my-tag
```

Import notes from a directory Restores notes from a directory of .md files.

# By default, skips any notes that already exist
medi import --dir /path/to/notes

# Import a single
medi import --file /path/to/note.md --key my-note

# Overwrite existing notes with the imported versions
medi import --file /path/to/note.md --key my-note --overwrite

Shell Completion

To make medi even faster to use, you can enable shell completion. Add one of the following lines to your shell's configuration file.

For Zsh (~/.zshrc):

eval "$(medi generate-completion zsh)"

For Bash (~/.bashrc):

eval "$(medi generate-completion bash)"

For Fish (~/.config/fish/config.fish):

medi generate-completion fish | source

Project Roadmap 🗺️

This section tracks the implementation status of medi's features. Contributions are welcome!

All core commands (new, get, list, edit, delete, import, export).
Configuration file for settings (e.g., database path).
Support for note metadata (tags, creation dates).
export notes by tag.
Full-text search over note content.
Implement a task command for tracking the status of notes.

medi 0.7.0