Organize your notes with your favourite editor and markup-language
Table of Contents
Markup languages like Markdown, ReStructuredText, asciidoc, textile, txt2tags or mediawiki are perfectly suited for fast note-taking. Type your notes with your favourite editor and chose your favourite markup language[1].
Tp-Note helps you to quickly get started writing notes with its powerful template system. As Tp-Note takes care that the note’s filename is always synchronized with its document title, you will find back your notes easily.
Tp-Note is available for Linux, Windows and iOS. This manual illustrates its main use-cases and how to get started:
Fast start note-taking (when the lecture starts).
Take a note about an existing (downloaded) file.
Bookmark and comment a hyperlink.
If you want to customize Tp-Note with own templates, another markup language, please consult the [man-page] for more technical details.
The project is hosted on Github: getreu/tp-note. The project’s webpage is on http://blog.getreu.net. The documentation of this project is dived into tow parts:
User manual
Unix man-page (more technical)
A fellow student still uses paper and pen. I ask her why, and she replied “I can better concentrate. My computer distracts me. I will do all other things, but not listening.”.
This is certainly true. As far as I am concerned, I am not good at logistics. For me having all documents and notes in one little machine is a blessing.
The following sections illustrate how to work with Tp-Note with my most common workflows.
Alternatively you can open the folder you want to create a new note in and right-click on some empty white space.
Note
Before and after launching the editor Tp-Note renames the file to be in sync with the note’s metadata (i.e. title and subtitle). For more details see [Document title - filename sync]
The source-code of the note shows, that the link has a target. The
left-click, opens the .odt document.
--- title: "03-Lied-Das_ist_mein_Teddybär - Lernstationen - Arbeitsblätter" subtitle: "Note" author: "getreu" date: "March 10, 2020" lang: "en_GB.UTF-8" revision: "1.0" --- [03-Lied-Das_ist_mein_Teddybär - Lernstationen - Arbeitsblätter.odt](03-Lied-Das_ist_mein_Teddybär - Lernstationen - Arbeitsblätter.odt)
To copy a link in markdown format a browser addon is needed. I recommend the addons Copy as Markdown and Copy Selection as Markdown available for Firefox.
The source code of the note shows the link target:
--- title: "Rustacean Station" subtitle: "URL" author: "getreu" date: "March 10, 2020" lang: "en_GB.UTF-8" revision: "1.0" --- [Rustacean Station](https://rustacean-station.org/)
In this example we copied only one Markdown-link “Rustacean Station”. Furthermore, Tp-Note allows you also to insert a list of Markdown links in a template. For example with Copy as Markdown you could copy a link list of all open tabs. In this case, Tp-Note would retain only the name of the first link as document title, whereas the whole link-list would appear in the body of the note.
The source code of the note shows the completed template:
--- title: "Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen" subtitle: "Note" author: "getreu" date: "2020-03-23" lang: "en_GB.UTF-8" revision: "1.0" --- Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape...
In this example we copied only text. Tp-Note suggests the first sentence as title. This can be changed before saving as illustrated above. Here we just save and observe the file on the disk.
Tp-Note’s greatest advantage is it’s flexibility. It easily integrates with your workflow. As people work differently, there is no best usage either. Nevertheless, after having used Tp-Note for some months now, here my personal preferences and configuration:
Addon for Firefox: Copy Selection as Markdown
Markdown editor : Typora
Integration with you file-manager as described below.
My favorite Markdown editor at the moment is Typora. I like its clean and simple interface helping me to concentrate on the content while writing.[2]
When copying extracts from a web-page I often need to preserve its hyperlinks. For this, the Firefox browser addon Copy Selection as Markdown is very handy. It precedes the copied extract with a hyperlink to the origin of the webpage. When TP-Note reads the extract from the clipboard, it uses the first Markdown hyperlink it can find for composing the note’s title and its filename on disk. This is why the webpage’s name ends up automatically in the note’s title and filename. Here a sample work flow:
Note, no content or filename was edited manually in this example. Tp-Note takes care of interpreting the clipboard’s content and generating the file on disk.
Consider the following Tp-Note-file:
20151208-Make this world a better place--Suggestions.md
The filename has 4 parts:
{{ sort-tag }}-{{ title }}--{{ subtitle }}.{{ extension }}
A so called sort-tag is a numerical prefix at
the beginning of the filename. It is used to order files and notes
in the file system. Besides numerical digits, a
sort-tag can be any combination of
0123456789-_[3] and is usually used as:
chronological sort-tag
20140211-Reminder.doc 20151208-Manual.pdf
or as a sequence number sort-tag.
02-Invoices 08-Tax documents 09_02-Notes
The figures below illustrate organizing files with *sort-tags".
When Tp-Note creates a new note, it prepends
automatically a chronological sort-tag of
today. The {{ title }} part is usually derived
from the parent directory’s name omitting its own
sort-tag.
Depending on the operating system, the installation process is more or less automated and can be divided up into two steps:
Binary installation
This step consists of downloading Tp-Note’s binary and copying it to your hard-disk. See section Distribution on Tp-Note’s project page for a list of available packages and binaries.Optional integration with the filemananger.
At the moment of this writing, an installer automating steps 1. and 2. is available for Windows only. Packages for Debian Linux and Ubuntu help you with step 1. For other operating systems check section Distribution for precompiled binaries or build Tp-Note yourself.
Tp-Note’s template engine can be tested and used without window manager integration. This section shows a minimum setup to get started quickly.
Windows
Download the tp-note executable for Windows [4] and place it on your desktop.
Linux
Download the Tp-Note-binary for Linux and place it on your Desktop:
> cd ~/Desktop > wget https://blog.getreu.net/projects/tp-note/_downloads/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/release/tp-note > chmod 755 tp-note
A new Tp-Note-icon appears on your desktop.
To create a new note, either double-click on the Tp-Note-icon, or drag a folder or file and drop it on the to-note-icon. This opens an editor with your new note.
For more comfort, I recommend integrating Tp-Note into the file-manager’s context menu. See section [Integration with file manager] for more details. There you also will find a list of tested Markdown-editors, if you wish to use one. Tp-Note works with every Unicode text editor and Markdown-editor (see section Optional customization and man-page for more details).
Tp-Note’s note-files can be converted into
e.g. .docx, .odt,
.html with
Pandoc and then
printed.
Windows
When you see only Chinese characters in notepad, update Windows to the latest version or install Notepad++.
Display Tp-Note’s error messages:
Open the command-prompt: Click on Windows-Start, type
cmdand [Enter].Type:
Desktop\tp-note.exe -d >Desktop\debug.txt 2>&1
This creates the file
debug.txton your desktop. Open the file and scroll to the end.
Linux
Display Tp-Note’s error messages:
Open a console and change to the directory where you saved the Tp-Note-executable.
Type:
> tp-note -d 2>&1 | less
Your preferred markup language is not Markdown, but ReStructuredText, T2t, Textile, Wiki, Mediawiki or Asciidoc? Change it!
Please refer to Tp-Note’s man-page to learn how to change its templates in the configuration file.
Your preferred text editor is not Notepad? Change it![5]
Note-taking with Tp-Note is more fun with a good markup (Markdown) text editor, although any Unicode text editor will do (even Notepad >= Windows 10-update 1903). Tp-Note it preconfigured to work with:
Typora — a markdown editor, markdown reader. Make sure that you have at least version 0.9.89 installed, as this version contains a bugfix required to work properly with Tp-Note.
ReText — Simple but powerful editor for Markdown and reStructuredText
VS-Code, Atom …
Please refer to Tp-Note’s man-page to learn how to register your text editor in Tp-Note’s configuration file.
You prefer working in a desktop environment instead of working on a shell?
Read [Integration with file manager].
This section shows how to integrate Tp-Note in the context menu of your file manager. The context menu appears, when you click right on a file icon, on a directory icon or on the white space in between (cf. figure below). In the following we will configure the file-manager to launch Tp-Note with the path to the selected icon.
Tp-Note is distributed with a Microsoft
Windows Installler package
tp-note-x.x.x-x86_64.msi, which automates the
following key registration. Omit this section if you have
installed Tp-Note through this
.msi package!
Make the directory
C:\Windows\tp-note\bin\and movetp-note.exeinto it.Open the notepad text editor and paste the following registry-key into it.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\New Tp-Note] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\New Tp-Note\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\tp-note\\bin\\tp-note.exe\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\OpenWithList\tp-note.exe] @="" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.md\shell\edit.tp-note.exe] @="Edit Tp-Note" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.md\shell\edit.tp-note.exe\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\tp-note\\bin\\tp-note.exe\" \"%1\""
Save the file as:
File name:
tp-note.regSave as type:
All filesEncoding:
UTF-16 LE
Double-click on
tp-note.regand confirm several times.Assign
tp-noteas default application for.md-files
To simplify the configuration we first place the binary
Tp-Note in our $PATH:
> cd /usr/local/bin > sudo wget https://blog.getreu.net/projects/tp-note/_downloads/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/release/tp-note > sudo chmod 755 tp-note
Debian and Ubuntu user can also download [Debian/Ubuntu package] and install it with:
> sudo dpkg -i tp-note_X.X.X_amd64.deb
Most file-manager allow extending the context menu. As an example, the following images show the configuration of the Thunar-file-manger. In Thunar’s menu go to:
Edit -> Configure custom actions...
Alternatively, instead of manually adding custom actions for each user, you can do this system-wide:
sudo nano /etc/xdg/Thunar/uca.xml
Search for </actions> and replace it
with:
<action>
<icon>accessories-text-editor</icon>
<name>Tp-Note</name>
<command>tp-note %f</command>
<description>Tp-Note</description>
<patterns>*</patterns>
<directories/>
<audio-files/>
<image-files/>
<other-files/>
<text-files/>
<video-files/>
</action>
</actions>
The change becomes effective only after the user deletes his own
configuration file in
~/.config/Thunar/uca.xml.
Pcmanfm is the default file-manager Lubuntu and in Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi.
Create the configuration file:
sudo nano /usr/local/share/file-manager/actions/tp-note.desktop
with the following content:
[Desktop Entry] Type=Action Name[en]=Tp-Note Tooltip=Tp-Note Icon=package-x-generic Profiles=profile-zero; [X-Action-Profile profile-zero] Name[en]=Default profile Exec=tp-note %f
The above creates the custom context-menu item Tp-Note.
[1]
Tp-Note is preconfigured to work with many
well-known external text editors: e.g.: code,
atom, retext,
geany, gedit,
mousepad, leafpad,
nvim-qt, and gvim under
Linux and notpad++ and
notepad under Windows. To register your own
text editor, please consult the man-page. For best user
experience, I recommend text editors with internal markup
previewer.
[3]
The characters _ and - are
not considered to be part of the sort-tag
when they appear in first or last position.
[4] Versions for other operating systems and a Debian package are available here.
[5]
Tp-Note is preconfigured to work with
many well-known external text editors: e.g.:
code, atom,
retext, geany,
gedit, mousepad,
leafpad, nvim-qt,
and gvim under Linux and
notpad++ and notepad
under Windows. To register your own text editor, please
consult the man-page. For best user experience, I
recommend text editors with internal markup previewer.