TIL Tool

A simple tool for creating and indexing TILs (Today I Learned) from the command line. The idea is to make it quick and easy to add a TIL without interrupting your workflow very much.

Example TIL Repo

Quick Start

1. Download a til binary from the latest release and add it to your PATH
2. Run til. On first run it will create the ~/.til directory and initialize a git repo
3. Create your first TIL by running til open topic/title
4. Create a new, empty repo on github, gitlab, sourcehut, etc.
5. Run til push --remote https://github.com/username/today-i-learned.git, with the proper URL for your repo

Usage

open

Open a TIL by specifying the <topic>/<title>

til open Python/list_comprehensions

This will open a new document using the text editor set using $EDITOR. The document has a header which acts as a more thorough description than the title/filename:

# syntactic sugar for modifying items in a list

...

On first use til creates a folder at ~/.til and initiates a git repo. See Adding a remote for details on how to push TILs to GitHub or other GIT services.

TILs are saved to ~/.til/<topic>/<title>. Once you close the document, a README.md is regenerated.

ls

Use ls to list all TILs and details, or ls <query> to search TILs from the command line.

push

Use til push to add TILs, commit, and push to your remote repo. The README.md is regenerated prior to any files being pushed.

Adding a remote

When adding a remote, you should use a new remote repo. You can add or update the remote by using the push command with the --remote option. You only need to do this one time.

til push --remote https://github.com/username/today-i-learned.git

Alternatively, you can configure a remote manually. The code below is very similar to what the --remote option does.

# Change to the TIL directory
cd ~/.til
remote_url=https://github.com/username/today-i-learned.git
git remote remove origin || true
git remote add origin "${remote_url}"
git remote set-url --push origin "${remote_url}"
git push --set-upstream origin master

Setting the $EDITOR

You can configure which editor to use by setting the $EDITOR variable. For example:

EDITOR=nano til open python/list_comprehensions

Alternatively, you can stick this in your .bash_profile:

export EDITOR=nano

til should work wil almost any program, but you must be able to open a file by specifying it as an argument.

Editors that work well:

• sublime text (specify using subl, and ensure that the shell commands are installed)
• atom (install shell commands
• vscode (install shell commands)
• vim/vi
• emacs
• nano

Conributing

Please feel free to submit issues for bugs and suggestions.