Keeping notes in GitHub
I tend to write a lot of notes on a daily basis. Some of them on traditional paper in a daily bullet journal although most of my work gets documented in Bugzilla bugs or wikis for general information to others. However, sometimes I need to keep snippets of commands or cheatsheets of information as reference for work use. How I create, store and update those work notes has evolved over time.
Note creation
After much experimentation, years ago I settled on keeping the information in plain text files though nowadays I add some unobtrusive markdown tags to allow some nice formatting for the longer documents. I tend to write and edit the notes in vim making the task quick and easy. Sidenote: I am currently writing this blog post using markdown.
Storing the notes
In the beginning I would keep the notes stored on a remote server (NFS/GSA/CIFS) and rsync or some other way to keep the notes in sync. That usually wasn’t backed up well enough so I tried storing the notes in the cloud using Box and its sync tools but those tools were memory hogs. Eventually it dawned on me to use GitHub and we have the enterprise version of it at work so I have a private repo to keep them in although I don’t really store confidential notes there but I could. This tends to work out rather nicely for the following reasons:
- I have revision control in case I mess up
- I can clone or access the notes on any system I need them
- Notes are nicely formatted for free in the GitHub web interface thanks to the embedded markdown tags
Updating notes
vim is absolutely great for writing and editing but I still have to stage, commit and push the changes. There are plugins such as vim-fugitive that make updating the repo easier. I also mess around with the Atom editor which of course has very nice built-in support for GitHub plus it has a built-in viewer for markdown so I can quickly check it looks fine before staging, committing and pushing the changes which are just done by clicking on a couple of buttons. Oh yeah, just so I don’t seem too sacrilegious, I have the vim-mode-plus packages installed to make Atom “vim like”.
I am wondering what other folks use to organize their private work notes.
Originally published at lucianochavez.com on August 28, 2017.