Doily

Doily quietly manages the logistics of doing a little writing every day, whether you're journaling, noveling, or thesising. It stores files organized by date, maintains permission settings that you choose, and can keep your daily writings in git for you.

You're free to copy, modify, and distribute Doily, with attribution, under the terms of the MIT license. A copy is included in LICENSE.txt.

To see what's new, read the changelog.

Installation

Doily's only absolute prerequisites are bash and other utilities that come standard on normal Linux systems (like date). Optional features may have other requirements (notably git). The install script uses curl. All of these should be available in your distribution's package manager (using apt install curl or similar).

First, get the install script.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/relsqui/doily/master/install.sh -o install.sh

To install Doily systemwide for anyone to use, run it with no arguments.

bash install.sh

If you're installing for just yourself, run it with the --user flag.

bash install.sh --user

If your ~/bin directory isn't already in your $PATH, the script will print some helpful advice for fixing that. Follow it if you need to.

You can now safely remove the install script, if you wish. (You can also use it to uninstall doily later.)

rm install.sh

Configuration

The default configuration keeps all your dailies private, doesn't use git, and uses your existing default editor and pager and a sensible storage location. You can change these things by running doily config. If you want to read all the settings and an explanation of them before downloading or running Doily, you can look at the default configuration.

In a systemwide installation, the default configuration file which is given to new Doily users lives in /usr/local/etc/doily/default.conf.

Usage

When you run doily, it will drop you directly into a text editor. (You can configure which one in your configuration file, or by setting your $EDITOR environment variable.) Write whatever you came here to write, then save and quit the editor like normal. The file will be saved and dated.

If you're using git and have elected to write your own commit messages, you'll be prompted to write a message for the new commit. If you're using automatic messages, it will just update the repository for you.

Each day that you run doily, a new file will be created. If you run it again on the same day (before midnight, according to the clock of the computer you're writing on), you'll be editing the same file for that day. If the day rolls over while you're writing, whatever file you're currently in will still be saved under the previous day.

Commands

In addition to the default write action, Doily comes with a number of other commands, which you can add right after the command (like doily config).

config opens your configuration file to view or change settings.
read [date] views your past writing in a pager.
search [pattern] [date] searches a past writing for a regex.
version prints your Doily version.
And, of course, help shows you the list of commands and descriptions.

Tests

Doily is tested with Bats, the Bash Automated Testing System. Your distribution's packaging system may provide it; if not, follow the install directions in its repository.

Once you have Bats, you can run the tests with:

bats tests

Bats Bugs

If you get this error:

line 20: let: count+=: syntax error: operand expected (error token is "+=")

Run this helper script to fix it:

bash tests/fix_bats.sh

The helper script corrects a known bug in Bats.

Uninstalling

Doily is self-removing with its install script. If you don't still have it, download it again:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/relsqui/doily/master/install.sh -o install.sh

To remove a systemwide install:

bash install.sh --remove

For a single-user install:

bash install.sh --user --remove

In both cases, users' personal configuration files and daily writings will not be removed. Running the single-user remove command will print instructions for also removing your own personal files.

Status, Feedback, and Contribution

Have a bug report, idea, or request? Please add them to the issue tracker.
Want to contribute? Yay! Please comment on or create an issue first so we can discuss what you want to do before you make a pull request.
You can view progress towards the next build on the release checklist.
When in doubt, feel free to email me.

Why "Doily"?

Because "daily" is ungoogleable, especially in a software context.

relsqui / doily