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 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.