In one of my previous blog posts I introduced the concept of minimalist note taking as a note taking method and life style, that tries to improve informational self-determination by restricting oneself to a fully controlled hard and software environment. The presented method solely relies one some UTF-8 text editor application and optionally on a template system like Tp-Note. This note explains how to configure Tp-Note for [Neovim]. In the following I presume, that you know about Neovim's qualities already, so I will rather focus on the technical details about how to integrate the template system Tp-Note with Neovim.

This short note shows how to generate Vim's spell file format from the .aff and .dic files that Myspell uses. Myspell is distributed, inter alia, with OpenOffice.org and many Mozilla products. The OpenOffice .oxt files are zip packed archives containing Myspells's .aff and .dic dictionary files. As the Estonian spell file can not yet be downloaded automatically, we will go through the manual compilation and installation of the Estonian spell checker language file.

Confidentiality and technology selection

Personal notes reveal a lot about us: our unfiltered thoughts expose our (political) opinions and feelings and make us thus vulnerable in a social environment where a thoughtless word could mean the end of our (political) career. This is why note taking is counted as a severely individual, private, intimate activity.

The template based note-taking tool Tp-Note was originally designed as desktop application: Before creating a new note, the user copies interesting bits of text into the clipboard. When Tp-Note starts, it analyses the clipboard's content and fills out some template to create a new note. As Tp-Note makes extensive use of the clipboard, it mainly targets desktop systems running a graphical environment. But also when working on the console Tp-Note can be useful with its built-in clipboard simulation: Instead of copying the content into your clipboard, pipe it into Tp-Note

echo  "Some clipboard content" | tp-note

Seeing the myriad of note-taking software out there, it is not easy to find the right tool for a specific purpose. One way to categorize note talking software is to look at how the software stores the note. Technically, they fall into two categories:

1. Database storage
2. File system storage

This short note explains the two approaches to note-taking by means of two chosen free software tools: Zotero and Tp-Note. The latter is presented more in detail.