Jonot's Blog

Hey, remember that Ideas program that i created a while ago? Well I realized a long time ago that it had a lot of problems with it, so I decided to take a few minutes to make a better idea. But first, it’d be a good idea to go over the problems with the original:

• The original assumed that you have $XDG_DATA_HOME set to $HOME/.local/share, which is not necesarrily true.
• The program fails to use markdown correctly. In markdown, you use a single line break doesn’t create a new paragraph, you need a full empty line. but in this program, a full empty line ends the file.
• Using this weird text editor is pretty weird. times, which I’ll get into later
• And most importantly, for a “simple” and “minimalist” program, there’s a lot of unnecesarry complexity.

So here is a new program that improves on all of these problems:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [[ -v $XDG_DATA_HOME]]; then
	base="$XDG_DATA_HOME"
else
	base="$HOME/.local/share"
fi
path="$base/ideas/$1.md"
echo "# $1" > "$path"
nano "$path"

You can see that it checks the variable $XDG_DATA_HOME, and falls back to the old method if it doesn’t exist. The markdown issues and strange editor issues are fixed by just opening the created file in nano. Feel free to switch this to whatever text editor tickles your fancy.

This program can be used the same as the last one. Put this in a text file, and chmod +x it so you can execute it. Then put it somewhere on your path.

To run the command, you can do ideas <title> and it will be recorded.

The main reson that I did this is because I thought it would be a good idea to go back to something I had done in the past and improve it. Alright, have a nice day!