Ideas is a really simple program, and yet out of all of the programs I have made, it is probably the one I have used the most. It’s so short, in fact, that I’ll just put the entire source code into this post:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from pathlib import Path
import os

# Folder for ideas
IDEAS_FOLDER = Path(os.environ["HOME"]) / ".local/share/ideas/"

def main():
    title = input("What is your idea? ")

    print("Interesting, tell me more...")
    description = list()
    line = "placeholder"
    while line != "":
        line = input("> ")
        description.append(line)
    
    path = IDEAS_FOLDER / f"{title}.md"
    with path.open("w") as idea_file:
        idea_file.write(f"# {title}\n")
        for line in description:
            idea_file.write(f"{line}\n")

    print(f"Sounds like a fun idea! I recorded it at {path}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

I don’t think that this program is very hard to understand. What it does is it asks for a title and an idea, then takes an arbitrary number of lines about it. Once you’re done, it saves it to a file in the folder ~/.local/share/ideas/ folder. One more interesting thing about this is that the way the title is formatted makes it basically a markdown file.

Inspiration

Often in my life I would have an idea for a program or really anything. I would think about it for a while, but ultimately, I would forget about it. And previously I had tried to store these in places like Logseq, but I wouldn’t often use them. This program fixes that problem because of how easy it is. I just Ctrl-Shift-T to open a terminal, type “idea” and then just type my idea.

Minimalism

I’ve already touched upon this in the previous paragraph, but I feel like one of the best parts of this program is how it doesn’t do more than I need it to. Since it operates on files, all of the things that I might want to do with these ideas are trivial with basic Unix commands:

# Count the number of ideas
ls ~/.local/share/ideas | wc -l
# Get a random idea
ls ~/.local/share/ideas | shuf -n 1
# Delete a bad or completed idea
rm ~/.local/share/ideas/whatever.md
# Add more information about an idea
nano ~/.local/share/ideas/whatever.md

And the list goes on.

Caveats

I will admit that the program is not perfect. There are a few problems that I have with it:

It doesn’t do markdown entirely correctly

So when using the program, you might notice that once you put an empty line, it will exit and save your idea. However, in markdown, you need a line break to split pargagraphs. So if you actually view any of these ideas in any markdown viewer, it’ll all just appear on one line

It doesn’t check for valid characters

I’ve had on a couple occasions where I want to put a slash in an ideas title, but since that is a file name, I can’t, and sometimes I do not realize this until I have already typed out the rest of my idea, which is a major inconvenience.

I can’t use it for most of the day

Most of my day is spent on a Chromebook away from my computer, so if I come up with an idea while I’m at school, I have to either

• Remember it until I get home
• Put it in some random google document and try to remember to transfer it

Conclusion

Despite all of the issues with this program, I still think it is great, and I would recommend that you either use this or something similar if you are anything like me with ideas.

Installation

To install this, just copy that text into a file named idea, set the execute bit with chmod +x ./idea, and move it to ~/.local/bin or somewhere else on your path.