Frag's Writings :: Notes

Notes

Notes

Notes. A necessary evil to compensate for limited greymatter that a human has. Notes become even more necessary when one is juggling too many things at a time. A simple paper and pen system is often a good start, as compared to keeping everything locked in the noggin, but in this digital age, one cannot help but wonder if there are better ways to deal with the problem of keeping notes and quickly finding them when the need arises.

Note-taking Applications

There are plenty of note-taking applications, often with fancy interfaces and cloud sync capabilities. The problem with these though, is that they do not lend themselves to use in a locked down environment such as a college/work environment where the machine being used has a specific configuration and the user is not granted superuser privileges or the permission to install additional software. Sync is also meaningless in such settings as such computers are often not connected to the internet for "security reasons". How then can one keep and find notes quickly and reliably in such an environment? By (ab)using existing tools and making up some weird conventions of course, aka jugaad.

A Convoluted Setup

A simple plain-text based note-taking setup with support for rudimentary tags (and search based on these tags) can be built using just two simple tools found in the standard C or C++ programmer's toolbox, viz. a text-editor and cscope source indexing and browsing utility (alternatively, ctags, the code tag generation tool can also be used with suitable changes). Here's how yours truly built and used a system for notes while working thru' various lab exercises from a restricted local user account on college computers:

• Create an empty directory to hold the notes, this could be in your $HOME dir for general/catch-all notes or a sub-dir within a specific project (eg: the doc or misc folder) for the project/workspace specific stuff
• Start with an empty file with a meaningful name (or timestamp using touch $(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M), for example. This command itself can be aliased to something like new_note for convenience)
• In the first line of the newly created note, add tags as you would declare a global variables in C or C++. As a convention, I use const int as the datatype and no initializers, eg: const int meta, mid_term_prj, lab02;
• From the second line onwards, content of the note can follow

Indexing and Finding By Tag

The purpose of declaring tags as variables is to (ab)use cscope and its capability to quickly jump to definition of variables. To get cscope to work its magic, the following _ritual preparations are necessary:

• Create a list of notes to be indexed using ls > cscope.files or similar. Run cscope over these with cscope -b -q -k. This will index all the tags (global variable declaration)
• To find a note based on tags, run cscope in standalone mode with cscope -d (or from within your editor) and use the Find this C symbol: or equivalent to search by tag
• To find a note based on content. run grep or similar

Limitations

Obviously this is an improvised system and has lots of limitations compared to a real note-taking program, some important ones are:

• If your notes are in the same dir as your source, the real variables in your code and the pseudo variables used as tags will get all mixed up. Excercise caution while importing cscope DB in your editor
• This "solution" will not scale well
• No sync or backup capabilities of any sort
• No hyperlink or cross-reference capability (can workaround by using extern int _tag_to_xref; or something similar along with Find All References)

Current Status

I still employ this system on a day-to-day basis (mostly out of habit) along with simple checklists to keep track of what needs to be done and how to go about doing it.