Upgrade to terminal notes system

Last year I wrote about using yazi and helix for viewing and writing notes in the terminal. I have continued to evolve my setup, now with using a tmux split to dual pane helix with glow so I can preview the note as I write it.

First a couple quick notes on these tools.

My preferred multiplexer is tmux. I know others exist, but my brain works best with tmux. Plus, I’ve been curating a custom config for nearly a decade, so no plans to change anytime soon. My file manager is yazi. For a text editor, I’m hooked on helix. To render markdown previews I like to use glow.

In addition to my tmux config, I have a heavily customized yazi setup. The setup includes keyboard shortcuts for opening markdown files with helix or glow, depending on what I want to accomplish with notes. However, one of the things missing from my setup is the ability to easily open a preview of the file while editing it. Obviously I can use various tmux shortcuts to split panes, navigate to the note directory, and use glow to preview. The reason I want to preview is because of how tables are created in markdown. I’ve started projects and put a lot of information into tables and viewing it in markdown is awful. I want to be able to edit the note in helix, but render the table in a preview.

Back in July I switched back to using Nextcloud for essentially everything, including moving away from Obsidian to Nextcloud for notes. The Nextcloud Notes web editor is honestly pretty good, which could work for writing and previewing notes. But, I still organize my notes in folders. For example, for my projects I have it organized like so:

Notes
└── GTD
    ├── 1 Active Projects
    │   ├── Project A
    │   └── Project B
    ├── 2 Waiting For Projects
    │   └── Project C
    └── 3 Someday or Maybe Projects
        └── Project D

Nextcloud Notes in the browser doesn’t show these sub-directories. It shows the notes, but I can’t organize things the way I want without leaving the notes app, going to files, creating a sub-folder or file, and then go back to Notes. This isn’t going to work, except in a pinch.

I looked at other GUI tools for writing and previewing markdown and I didn’t like any of them. To be honest, the tools are fine. I just love writing notes on the command line using helix so much better.

So, here’s the solution I came up with. In my tmux config I added a keybinding for spliting the current pane horizontally and staying in the current working directory, then opening glow. This is what the entry in the config looks like:

bind C-n split-window -h -c "#{pane_current_path}" "glow"

This doesn’t open the actual file I’m editing in helix, it just opens glow in the same directory. But, I normally don’t have too many markdown files in each directory so I have a couple keystrokes to get it open.

Is it perfect? No. Is it easier? Yes.

Potential upgrade

I started working on this setup last night and kind of finalized it today. Then, in the commandline subreddit xqtr_ dropped MarkLn, a markdown editor with live preview in the terminal. This is exactly what I want, all built into a single tool!

This awesome person literally published it today, so I’ve only had a chance to play with it for an hour or so. But, it is so promising. The only thing I wish it had was Vim-style keybindings so I don’t have to learn new ones for a new tool. I am down for every CLI app using Vim-like keybindings or having a Vim-mode so we can have a mostly uniform keybinding set across all tools in the terminal. I sent an enhancement request on their Github earlier today. However, regardless of the keybindings, I think I’ll be using this tool a lot more over my custom setup.

To give it a proper test, I added it as an open option in yazi in the shift-o menu. I love how it opens and renders the preview.

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