Thoth

A terminal scratchpad inspired by Heynote.

Inspiration

As mentioned on Heynote's GitHub page, it is "a dedicated scratchpad for developers. It functions as a large persistent text buffer where you can write down anything you like." This app is truly great, and I've quite enjoyed using it as dedicated scratchpad. However, I work in the terminal, and I was finding several workflows in which having a terminal based scratchpad would be nice. Enter Thoth! Thoth follows the same design philosophy as Heynote in terms of its simplicity, but with some key differences.

Differences Compared to Heynote

• The persistent buffer in Thoth gets saved as a markdown file in your home directory. I did this since I use Obsidian for all of my notes, and I wanted my scratchpad to also be displayable in the app.
• Blocks are titled and can be selected by title.
• The ability to edit a block using your favorite terminal editor such as Neovim, Helix, Vim, and others via setting the $EDITOR or $VISUAL environment variables.
• A CLI that allows one to pipe information via STDIN into a new block, or use STDOUT to get text out of a block.

Why the name Thoth?

In Egyptology, Thoth is the god of writing, wisdom, and magic. Thoth was in charge of messenging and recording knowledge and events for the Egyptian deities. Seems like a fitting name for a persistent scratchpad :).

Main tools used to build Thoth

• tui-textarea
• ratatui
• crossterm
• pulldown-cmark
• clap

Installation

Via Cargo

If you have cargo installed on your machine, you can download directly from crates.io

cargo install thoth-cli

From binaries via Release section

Go to the release page, and download the binary associated with your OS (Note: currently supports Linux and MacOS). Once you have downloaded the binary, go to the location where you downloaded the binary, rename the binary to thoth, and give the binary executable permissions by doing the following:

cd /path/to/binary
mv current_binary_name thoth
chmod +x thoth

You can then move binary if you choose so. Finally, add the path of the binary to your $PATH.

From Source

To build from source, please make sure that you have the Rust compiler installed (version 1.70.0 or higher), and the Cargo package manager. You can install both by installing rustup.

Once you have installed Rust, please do the following:

git clone https://github.com/jooaf/thoth.git
cd thoth
cargo build --release

The binary lives in thoth/target/release/thoth. You can add the binary to your $PATH.

Usage

This will show how to use the scratchpad via the CLI or the TUI.

TUI

To start the TUI, simple type thoth. Since it is a persistent buffer, thoth will save when you hit quit using q.

Commands for main mode

q: Quit 
<ctrl-n>: Add block in focus
<ctrl-d>: Delete block in focus
<ctrl-y>: Copy the complete block
Enter: Edit block 
<ctrl-f>: Full Screen 
Esc: Exit 
<ctrl-t>: Change title of block 
<ctrl-s>: Select block by title
<ctrl-j>: Format json
<ctrl-k>: Format markdown 

Commands for edit mode

Esc: Exit edit mode
<ctrl-g>: Move cursor top 
<ctrl-b>: Copy highlighted selection 
Shift-Up Arrow or Down: Make highlighted selection by line
<ctrl-y>: Copy the entire block
<ctrl-t>: Change title of block 
<ctrl-s>: Select block by title 
<ctrl-e>: Use external editor 
<ctrl-h>: Bring up other commands

The other commands are based off of the default keybindings for editing in tui-textarea.

If you would like to use your external editor -- such as NeoVim, Helix, etc. -- Thoth offers that functionality.

CLI

For accessing the CLI, one can use thoth followed by a command.

A terminal scratchpad akin to Heynote

Usage: thoth [COMMAND]

Commands:
  add     Add a new block to the scratchpad
  list    List all of the blocks within your thoth scratchpad
  delete  Delete a block by name
  view    View (STDOUT) the contents of the block by name
  copy    Copy the contents of a block to the system clipboard
  help    Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version  

Examples

# For adding new blocks 
thoth add hello_world "Hello, World!";
# For adding new blocks with content from STDIN 
echo "Hello, World (from STDIN)" | thoth add hello_world_stdin;
# Using view to pipe contents into another command
thoth view hello_world_stdin | cat