Helix as a notes tool
I've been writing about using paper notes for stuff a couple of times (Paper notes & Revisting paper notes). So you might ask why am I talking about using Helix as a notes tool? Sometimes I need to jot something down, like notes for this blog, work-related stuff, a debugging log etc. I mainly use my paper notes for day-to-day stuff.
Setup
- A notes folder in
$HOME
. - Shell-script for creating/opening existing markdown notes.
- Keyboard-shortcut manager to execute the shell-script
- (optional) Nextcloud for syncing my notes.
Shell-script
#!/bin/sh
notePath="$HOME/notes"
noteFilename="$notePath/note-$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md"
if [ ! -f $noteFilename ]; then
echo "# Notes for $(date +%Y-%m-%d)" > $noteFilename
fi
cd $notePath
$EDITOR $noteFilename
This script checks if there is an existing note for todays date, if not it will
add a new heading. Then it will cd
me to the notes-folder and open in my
editor, which is Helix.
The reason why I'm cd
into the folder is when I close the editor or close it
to the foreground. And also so that I have the correct folder available in the
file picker.
Keyboard shorcut
I use Alfred on macOS, where I have a workflow with a keyboard shortcut:
CMD + SHIFT + n
. This opens a new terminal tab and runs my shell-script.
Syncing
I use what I already have, and that is Nextcloud. So my notes-folder is a synced and available on my phone via the Nextcloud notes app.
How does this compare to Obsidian etc.?
I have installed Marksman's LSP on my machine, which means I get things like wiki-links, autocomplete and other intellisense-goodies.

It feel super light-weight, and I can create new notes by using Helix's
:run-shell-command
or just :write <new-file>.md
.
I guess the only thing I'm missing is the graph and see how notes are related.
But for my needs I simply need a place to take notes, and it's nice to have a
way to link them together without running ls
and checking what the file was
called etc.
And to not contradict my previous post about Markdown, I can also use normal Markdown-linking with autocomplete.