Welcome to yewdocs’ documentation!¶
Yewdocs is a personal document manager that makes creating and editing text documents from the command line easier than using only an editor and filesystem commands.
Yewdocs is for text documents: plain text, restructuredText, markdown, conf, etc. It offers these features:
Filesystem transparency: the user doesn’t need to know where files are stored.
Entirely keyboard driven.
Tags: define tags and organise your documents with them.
Familiar commands: yewdocs has commands like ‘ls’, ‘head’, ‘tail’, that are familiar to most shell users.
Optional cloud storage for synchronising to multiple devices/workstations.
Document conversions: it will generate any format that pandoc is able to convert to/from. There is special support for generation of html and the use of templates.
Integration with other command line utilities: as just another shell utility, you can do normal shell piping in and out, grep, etc.
Think of it as a command line note taking application.
The target users are those who prefer to work on the command line without the overhead of switching back and forth between a shell and the host OS GUI. When working regularly on the command line, it is a considerable annoyance to have to break out to use the host OS file management app to find files and use the mouse. Yewdocs lets the user seamlessly browse and operate on her collection of text files. These can be snippets, larger documents, notes, etc. Exporting to other formats is easy and natural.
A major design goal is to reduce the mental overhead of finding files. Once a file is managed by Yewdocs, it is easy to perform operations like editing it without needing to remember the exact name or location. Documents can be managed by Yewdocs either within its own repository or in-place as linked documents.
You are not forced to choose between your favourite non-text editor and shell editor. You can just as well use Sublime, Atom or other non-console interfaces for editing Yewdocs documents.
It’s possible to maintain text documents on a server and sync to any local device that supports Python (>= 3.6) and one of the common *nix shells.
You can edit and manage any kind of text file, txt, rst, md, conf, etc. Yewdocs does have a slight prejudice towards Markdown for newly created documents but you can easily specify any format you wish or convert a file to another format after creating it.