Tp-Note - Markup enhanced granular note-taking

Save and edit your clipboard content as a note file

Jens Getreu

Cargo Documentation License

1 Overview of Tp-Note

Tp-Note is a versatile note-taking tool designed for both desktop and console environments. It allows users to create, edit, and manage notes efficiently. This tool is ideal for users looking for a simple yet powerful way to manage their notes across different platforms.

Screenshot

1.1 Key Features

1.2 Usage Examples

Action Command Example
Create a note from clipboard tpnote (when clipboard contains text)
Convert HTML to Markdown curl https://example.com | tpnote
Edit an existing note tpnote ./path/to/note.md
Generate PDF from a note tpnote -x - note.md | weasyprint - note.pdf

1.3 User review

On Tue, 2023-12-19 at 12:58 +1100, Dev Rain wrote:

Found Tp-Note awhile back and it has become part of my daily workflow, and indeed part of my daily note-taking life. I wanted to extend my thanks; so thank you. dev.rain

Read more in Tp-Note’s user manual, Download Tp-Note or visit the project page: Tp-Note - Minimalistic note-taking.


2 Documentation

User documentation:

Developer documentation:

3 Source code

Repository:

4 Distribution

4.1 Download installer packages and binaries

4.1.1 Tp-Note Microsoft Windows installer package

4.1.2 Tp-Note Debian/Ubuntu installer package

4.1.3 Various binaries for Windows, MacOS and Linux

4.2 Tp-Note in official package repositories

4.2.1 Tp-Note on NetBSD

4.2.2 Tp-Note on NixOS

4.2.3 Get Tp-Note with the Nix package manager

4.3 Other resources

5 Installation

Tp-Note can be installed via a Windows installer package or by placing the binary directly on your desktop for easy access. It is recommended to integrate it into your file manager’s context menu for convenience.

Depending on the availability of installer packages for your operating system, the installation process is more or less automated. For Windows users the fully automated installation package tpnote-latest-x86_64.msi is available. For more information, please consult the Distribution section above and the Installation section in Tp-Note’s manual.

5.1 Upgrading

While upgrading Tp-Note, new features may cause a change in Tp-Notes’s configuration file structure, e.g.:

*** ERROR:
Can not load or parse the (merged) configuration file(s):
---
invalid length 3, expected fewer elements in array in `viewer.served_mime_types`


Note: this error may occur after upgrading Tp-Note due to some incompatible
configuration file changes.

Tp-Note renames and thus disables the last sourced configuration file.

Additional technical details:
*    Command line parameters:
tpnote -b 
*    Sourced configuration files:
/home/joe/.config/tpnote/tpnote.toml

Mote, the configuration file backup is stored in the same directory as the last sourced configuration file, e.g. /home/joe/.config/tpnote/. If Tp-Note sources more than one configuration file, consider the possibility of syntax errors in any of these files (cf. Customization section of Tp-Note’s man-page).

6 Building

If the above precompiled binaries do not suite you, you can compile Tp-Note yourself.

  1. Install Rust

  2. Download, compile and install Tp-Note:

    Building on Linux

    cargo install tpnote
    sudo cp ~/.cargo/bin/tpnote /usr/local/bin
    # Download icon
    cd /usr/local/share/icons
    sudo wget https://blog.getreu.net/projects/tp-note/assets/tpnote.svg

    On Linux, Tp-Note displays errors and debug messages as notifications. This requires a Linux/BSD based desktop environment that follows the XDG specification, e.g. KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDC, Mate (and most others).1

    Recommended Linux console and server version

    The full-featured version of Tp-Note depends on GUI libraries like Xlib which might not be available on a headless system. Either download the Musl version x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release/tpnote or compile Tp-Note yourself without default features:

    cargo install --no-default-features \
      --features lang-detection,renderer tpnote
    sudo cp ~/.cargo/bin/tpnote /usr/local/bin

    If Tp-Note’s binary size if of concern, omit the lang-detection feature in the cargo invocation above. The lang-detection feature causes 95% of the final binary size because of its extensive language models.

    Building on Windows and macOS

    Build the full-featured version2 with:

    cargo install tpnote

6.1 Cross compilation

Debian makes it easy to cross-compile for foreign architectures. Here are some examples:

This project follows Semantic Versioning.

7 About

Author:

Copyright:


  1. In case an XDG desktop environment is not available, you can opt out notifications and message boxes by omitting the message-box feature by adding --no-default-features --features lang-detection,read-clipboard,renderer,viewer to cargo install tpnote. Now, all error messages are dumped on the console from where you started Tp-Note into stderr.↩︎

  2. When building for Windows or macOS, it does not make sense to exclude the message-box feature, because - under Windows and macOS - it does not rely on the notification library. Instead, it uses direct OS-API calls for popping up alert boxes. As these calls have no footprint in binary size or speed, always keep the message-box feature compiled in.↩︎