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Re:Show HN: CLI plain-text notes & bookmarks with Git, sync,... by dmd on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @03:17PM (#24711628)
I hate to be critical of what's a rather impressive piece of work, but a lot of the reason for that length is just a lot of repetition, e.g. https://github.com/xwmx/nb/blob/master/nb#L10423
Re:Show HN: CLI plain-text notes & bookmarks with Git, sync,... by xwmx on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @03:35PM (#24711830)
That particular function, `nb show`, is a big `if` statement checking the file type and environment for available tools. I'm more than happy for suggestions and / or pull requests for optimizing that.

Note that Bash is a weird language that doesn't provide language features found in normal languages, and this targets old Bash which doesn't even have associative arrays, so there are things that might look "wrong", but aren't necessarily in this context. That's a big part of what makes it interesting to code in.

Re:Show HN: CLI plain-text notes & bookmarks with Git, sync,... by pantulis on Thursday October 08, 2020 @03:04AM (#24716634)
Why did you decide to go with Bash instead of another scripting language like Python or Ruby? Portability? "Just because"?

I am not bashing Bash ;) but genuinously interested in the motivations as a programmer. You have stated that the Bash shortcomings are "interesting", so I guess it boils down to some kind of "who cares, let's do it with Bash".

I tried nb yesterday and damn if it had a native capture tool for macOS and iOS this would be the perfect Evernote replacement for me.

Re:Show HN: CLI plain-text notes & bookmarks with Git, sync,... by xwmx on Thursday October 08, 2020 @11:46AM (#24720223)
Portability, philosophy, style. I find that designing within constraints can lead to interesting solutions, and this project has focused on embracing and leveraging the command line interface itself.