Excerpt.el

An personal excerpt manange system on Emacs.

Requirement

• sqlite3: Database to save excerpts.
• dash.el: A modern list API for Emacs.
• f.el: A modern API for working with files and directories in Emacs.
• s.el: The long lost Emacs string manipulation library.
• emacsql: A high-level Emacs Lisp front-end for SQLite.

Install

Clone this to local directory, set load-path and require.

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/excerpt")

;; database file
(setq excerpt-database-file "~/.emacs.d/excerpt.db")

(require 'excerpt)

Usage

By pressing M-x excerpt, enter the *Excerpt* buffer. It shows all the excerpts in buffer.

Key binding

• j/n (excerpt-next-excerpt): Move point to next excerpt.
• k/p (excerpt-previous-excerpt): Move point to previous excerpt.
• l/<tab> (excerpt-next-tag): Move point to next tag.
• h/<backtab> (excerpt-previous-tag): Move point to previous tag.
• a (excerpt-add-excerpt): Add a new excerpt. See Adding/Editing/Deleting excerpts.
• e (excerpt-edit-excerpt): Modify excerpt at point. See Adding/Editing/Deleting excerpts.
• d (excerpt-delete-excerpt): Delete exceprt ta point. See Adding/Editing/Deleting excerpts.
• g (excerpt-refresh): Refresh buffer.
• f (excerpt-filter-map): see Filtering.
• x (excerpt-database-map): see Importing/Exporting

Filtering

There are three ways to filter excerpts: by tags, by date, or by matching content. All the commands should be executed under excerpt-mode.

Press f a or M-x excerpt-filter-all to show all excerpts in database again.

Filtering by tags

commands: f t (excerpt-filter-by-tags)

Tags are read from minibuffer. There are completions for existing tags.

If multiple tags are input, make sure they are separated by comma ,.

Note that, all the space in the beginning or end of tag will be removed by s-trim, i.e. " tag1, tag2 3, tag4 " will become ("tag1" "tag2 3" "tag4").

Filtering by date

commands: f d (excerpt-filter-by-date)

Select a date in minibuffer, then all the excerpts recording in that date show in buffer.

There are completions for date having excerpts.

Filtering by matching content

commands: f s (excerpt-filter-by-content)

Input keywords in minibuffer to match the excerpts’ body. Keywords are separated by space.

Now there won’t show completion when inputing strings.

Adding/Editing/Deleting excerpts

Adding and editing commands invoke a buffer in excerpt-edit-mode, on which you can operate the content of excerpt.

• A line starting with ; is considered as comment.
• Tags start with #, they can stay in one line, or multiple line.
• C-c C-s to save the modification.
• C-c C-k to discard the modification.
• C-c C-i to insert a tag by completing in minibuffer.

Once you modify(or add) an excerpt and save, editing buffer close, and showing buffer refreshes.

When you try to delete an excerpt, there invokes a confirmation, namely you have to input yes-or-no.

Importing/Exporting

Now the external files are supportive only for JSON type. The form is like:

{
    data: [
        {
            content: "cnt",
            date: "1970-12-07",
            tags: ["t1", "t2", ...]
        }, ...
    ]
}

The whole structure has only one key data, with an array as value. Each element in the array is a excerpt, consisting of three slots: content, date, and tags, where tags is another array containing tags’ string.

Importing

commands: x i (excerpt-import)

Select a file in disk, excerpt.el then parse and append into database, which means it won’t change the data existing in database, and do not care about if there ares duplicate excerpts – It is really hard to tell whether two excerpts are the same.

Exporting

commands: x e (excerpt-export)

Export the excerpts in the buffer to a JSON file. So you have to filter the excerpts you want, then execute exporting.

• [ ] Adding abitary excerpts that are wanted to buffer
• [ ] Allow to override the old data in importing
• [ ] More importing/exporting data type supported
• [ ] Match excerpts’ body by regular expression
• [ ] Custom faces
• [ ] Daily review – Show a random excerpt after Emacs starts, different from each days