til

til is a fast, simple, command line-driven, mini-static site generator for quickly capturing and publishing one-off notes.

All in only two commands.

Example output: https://github.com/senorprogrammer/tilde

tl;dr

❯ til New title here
  ...edit
❯ til -save

And you're done.

Contents

• Installation
  • From source
• Configuration
  • Example
• Usage
  • Creating a new page
  • Building static pages
  • Building, saving, committing, and pushing
• Publishing to GitHub Pages
• Live Example
• Frequently Unasked Questions

Installation

From source

go get -u github.com/senorprogrammer/til
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/senorprogrammer/til
go install .
which til
til --help

Configuration

When you first run til --help it will display the help and usage info. It also will also create a default configuration file.

You will need to make some changes to this configuration file.

The config file lives in ~/.config/til/config.yml (if you're an XDG kind of person, it will be wherever you've set that to).

Open ~/.config/til/config.yml, change the following entries, and save it:

* committerEmail
* committerName
* editor
* targetDirectory

committerEmail and committerName are the values til will use to commit changes with when you run til -save.

editor is the text editor til will open your file in when you run til [some title here].

targetDirectory is where til will write your files to. If the target directory does not exist, til will try to create it.

Config Example

---
commitMessage: "build, save, push"
committerEmail: test@example.com
committerName: "TIL Autobot"
editor: "mvim"
targetDirectory: "~/Documents/til"

Usage

til only has three usage options: til, til -build, and til -save.

Creating a new page

❯ til New title here
2020-04-20T14-52-57-new-title-here.md

That new page will open in whichever editor you've defined in your config.

Building static pages

❯ til -build

Builds the index and tag pages, and leaves them uncommitted.

Building, saving, committing, and pushing

❯ til -save [optional commit message]

Builds the index and tag pages, commits everything to the git repo with the commit message you've defined in your config, and pushes it all up to the remote repo.

-save makes a hard assumption that your targetDirectory is under version control, controlled by git. It is highly recommended that you do this.

-save also makes a soft assumption that your targetDirectory has remote set to GitHub (but it should work with remote set to anywhere).

-save takes an optional commit message. If that message is supplied, it will be used as the commit message. If that message is not supplied, the commitMessage value in the config file will be used. If that value is not supplied, an error will be raised.

Publishing to GitHub Pages

The generated output of til is such that if your git remote is configured to use GitHub, it should be fully compatible with GitHub Pages.

Follow the GitHub Pages setup instructions, using the /docs option for Source, and it should "just work".

Live Example

An example published site: https://senorprogrammer.github.io/tilde/. And the raw source: github.com/senorprogrammer/tilde

Frequently Unasked Questions

Isn't this just (insert your favourite not this thing here)?

Yep, probably. I'm sure you could also put something like this together with Hugo, or Jekyll, or bash scripts, or emacs and some lisp macros.... Cool, eh?

Does it have search?

It does not.

Does this work on Windows?

Good question. No idea. Let me know?