Objective

Since I've drifted away from Evernote, all of my notetaking has been stored locally in markdown. In this project I'm going to create a local directory and sync it up with a remote machine in my house using git to back my notebook up.

I also just discovered vimwiki via Hacker News and am really loving it. I'm still going to write all of my notes in markdown, but I'll also add vimwiki to the mix to help traverse my notebook.

Setup

You'll need all of these things to get started:
- Git installed locally.
- A dedicated home PC with SSH enabled for your remote machine (git should be installed here as well). I had an old netbook lying around (remember those?) and so I installed Lubuntu as my remote OS.
- A NoIP account.
- Access to your home router.
- Vimwiki (we'll get to how to install this later in the guide).

Setup NoIP on your remote machine

NoIP is a free service that allows you to get around that pesky issue of having a dynamic IP address from your ISP. If you have a static IP then you can skip all of the NoIP stuff and just skip to setting up your router.

• Create an account and domain at NoIP
• Install the NoIP client on your remote machine Client Download

Setup your router

• Login to your router and set your remote machine to a static IP so it doesn't change addresses every time it or the router is restarted.
• Also forward port 22 (SSH port) to your remote machine's IP.

Getting started with a simple git repo

Let's first create a new directory called notebook on your home directory. Create an empty note file that we can use as an example and initialize a git repo:

mkdir ~/notebook 
cd ~/notebook
touch first_note.md
git init
git add first_note.md
git commit -m 'first commit'

Create a bare directory on the remote machine

ssh <remote_machine>
git init --bare notebook.git

Connect your local repo to the remote git server

cd ~/notebook
git remote add origin <remote>:~/notebook.git
git push -u origin master

At this point you should have pushed your first commit up to your remote machine. Congrats! But we're not done yet...

Setup vimwiki for awesome notetaking

To setup vimwiki you'll need to make sure you have Pathogen installed first. This is a pretty easy install actually, I'll transcribe the steps here:

mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload ~/.vim/bundle
curl -LSso ~/.vim/autoload/pathogen.vim https://tpo.pe/pathogen.vim

You can now setup all sorts of vim plugins through a very easy package manager designed for Vim! OK, now install vimwiki:

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki.git

Vimwiki is now installed! However, there is some additional configuration to get all of vimwiki's features to work properly.

Add the following to ~/.vimrc:

call pathogen#infect()
call pathogen#helptags()
set nocompatible
filetype plugin on
syntax on
let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/notebook/'}]
let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/notebook/', 'syntax': 'markdown', 'ext': '.md'}]

Vimwiki is now setup to default to the ~/notebook directory and will use markdown files instead of the vimwiki default type.

Create your first notes

Now that you have vimwiki installed, open vim to get started.

• Type <Leader>ww to create index.md.
  • <Leader> is typically set to \.
  • You can change default key for <Leader> by adding this line to ~/.vimrc: let mapleader = ","
• Add first_note to the index.
• Hover your cursor over first_note and press Enter.
• You should now be on ~/notebook/first_note.md which you created earlier!
• Press Backspace to return to the index.

Sync your notes!

Finally, you'll want to sync everything. This should be pretty easy if you know git well, but the most basic steps would be:

git -C ~/notebook add -A
git -C ~/notebook commit -m "updated"
git -C ~/notebook push

If you haven't used git much I recommend studying up on what the above commands actually do. You can even add a custom command to your bash instance. Add this to your .bashrc or .zshrc file:

alias syncnotes='git -C ~/notebook add -A && git -C ~/notebook commit -m "updated" && git -C ~/notebook push'

Now you can sync your notes simply by entering syncnotes!

That's it! There are more options in vimwiki you can use, but I'll leave that discovery up to you. Happy notetaking!