Robb. Knight.

A conversation yesterday in the Hemispheric Views Discord pushed me towards an idea I'd had for a workflow for a while: type some text, append that text to a note.

Don't care about the how? Download QuickNote here.

As Alfred workflows go it's pretty simple: just three objects.

The first is the keyword and getting the input. Typing quicknote This is a note will add This is a note to whatever file I've set in the configuration. The second script takes the input and formats it based on the settings the workflow has:

• The date can be included with a note and formatted with day.js
• The output can be customised with the {date} and {note} variables so if you want the note to be added with - for a markdown list, you can do that

The formatting script, aside from importing day.js, is pretty small:

// dayjs imported here

function run(argv)
{
    ObjC.import('stdlib');

	const input = argv[0]

	const dateFormat = $.getenv('date_format') ?? 'yyyy-mm-dd'
    const date = dayjs().format(dateFormat)
    const noteFormat = $.getenv('note_format') ?? '{note}'

    return noteFormat
        .replace(/{date}/g, date)
        .replace(/{note}/g, input)
} 

The last script is the one that adds the note to the file and is written in bash. This file takes into account the final setting of the workflow: should the note be appended or prepended.

# this is the formatted note from the previous script
query=$1

if [ $add_option = "start" ]; then
	echo -e "$query$(cat $quicknotefile)" > $quicknotefile 
else
	echo -e "$(cat $quicknotefile)\n$query" > $quicknotefile
fi

This is one of those workflows that's pretty simple and I've been meaning to build for a while but just didn't find the time to do it. I've pointed it at my "inbox" file in Obsidian to quickly add ideas and thing I need to check out.

Download QuickNote for Alfred workflow on GitHub.