Snag

The Structured Note Aggregator. Turns your never-to-be-seen-again journals into structured queriable logs, with a flexible schema, creating views, insights & metrics buried between the pages.

Snag is committed to being agnostic to your note editor, file structure, and supports any text-based format, like .txt or .md.

Problem Statement

I make daily notes, to record what I did each day. This keeps notes indexed by date, but doesn't allow we to pull by subject or type of activity.

I want to be able to ask questions of my journals and get answers, without having to do extra work outside of my daily notes.

• How many books did read this month or this year?
• What was my favourite book this year?
• How many concerts did I go to this year & what did I think of them?
• What were my favourite restaurants of the year? What did I have?

I want all of this, without removing this information from the context of the day, so I can go back and read by day, and read around these occurrences to see what else was happening.

Status: beta

I built this project for my own use, and depend upon it daily. Beyond my use-case the project is in beta. New functionality is coming weekly.

How to use

My use case is well described by the test example in e2e/. I want to structure my notes so I can query and sort them. For example, books I've read over time can be pulled from my daily journal and sorted by date, or by rating, or both.

• Put a .snag.yml at the root of your notes directory.
• Run snag in the same directory.
• snag will output your aggregated files as you specifcy.

Config

The .snag.yml file has the following options.

# schemas are the definitions you want to aggregate
schemas:
  # tag is what each entry should start with
  - tag: "book"

  # cols are all the columns you'll add to each entry
  cols:
  - name
  - finishDate
  - rating

  # sortColumns define how your entries should be sorted
  # e.g. sort by most recently read, then by rating
  sortColumns:
    - name: finishDate
    type: date
    ascending: false
    - name: rating
    type: number

    # aggregationtype defines how they should be collected
    # and output. Only list is available at the moment.
    aggregationType: list

    # where to save the result
    outputFilepath: "./aggregated/books_I_read.md"

Entries

With the current config, imagine you've got the following entries in your journals across various days.

6th June

#book The Count of Monte Cristo, 2022-06-06, 5
Love this book, so glad I re-read....

10th May

#book Walden, 2022-05-10, 4.5

2nd Sept

#book Where the Crawdads Sing, 2021-09-02, 4.5

With structured entries like this and the config file, I'd now get an aggregated list of books I'd read, in a single place.