Tp-Note - Markup enhanced granular note-taking

Save and edit your clipboard content as a note file

Jens Getreu

Cargo Documentation License

Tp-Note is a note-taking-tool and a template system - freely available for Windows, MacOS and Linux - that consistently synchronizes the note’s meta-data with its filename. Tp-Note’s main design goal is to convert some input text - usually provided by the system’s clipboard - into a Markdown note file with a descriptive YAML header and a meaningful filename. Tp-Note collects various information about its environment and the clipboard and stores them in variables. New notes are created by filling these variables in predefined and customizable Tera-templates. TP-Note’s default templates are written in Markdown and can be easily adapted to any other markup language if needed. After creating a new note, TP-Note launches the system’s text editor and connects the default web browser to Tp- Note’s internal Markdown/RestructuredText renderer and web server. The viewer detects note file changes and updates the rendition accordingly.

Screenshot

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.


1 Documentation

User documentation:

Developer documentation:

2 Source code

Repository:

3 Distribution

3.1 Download installer packages and binaries

3.1.1 Tp-Note Microsoft Windows installer package

3.1.2 Tp-Note Debian/Ubuntu installer package

3.1.3 Various binaries for Windows, MacOS and Linux

3.2 Tp-Note in official package repositories

3.2.1 Tp-Note on NetBSD

3.2.2 Tp-Note on NixOS

3.2.3 Get Tp-Note with the Nix package manager

3.3 Other resources

4 Installation

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.

4.1 Upgrading

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

*** 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

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).

5 Building

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

  1. Install Rust, e.g.

    curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
    
    sudo apt install build-essential    

    A modern Linux desktop usually ships the required shared libraries. Here is a list extracted form a Debian binary:

    ldd target/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/release/tpnote 
         linux-vdso.so.1
         libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
         librt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1
         libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0
         libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6
         libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2
         libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
         /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
  2. Download, compile and install Tp-Note:

    Building on Linux

    cargo install tpnote
    sudo cp ~/.cargo/bin/tpnote /usr/local/bin
    # Copy icon
    sudo cp assets/tpnote.svg /usr/local/share/icons

    Unlike previous Linux versions (<= 1.19.13), 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 probably also most others).

    The use of notifications also removes former GTK dependencies. Anyway, if you prefer to see error messages on the console only, you can opt out notifications and message boxes. In this case all error messages are dumped on the console from where you started Tp-Note into stderr:

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

    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 renderer,lang-detection tp-note
    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 version with:

    cargo install tpnote

    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.

    See also the user manual for a more detailed installation description.

5.1 Cross compilation

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

This project follows Semantic Versioning.

6 About

Author:

Copyright: