Editing Notes with Git

The NoteWriter is designed to work with Git. The NoteWriter doesn’t version your notes but let you use your favorite version control system.

Usage

The NoteWriter commands match the usual Git commands. You will probably run nt add before running git add and will often run nt commit before running nt commit.

Secured Files

You may want to push to a remote like GitHub. You may also want some notes to be encrypted before being pushed. You can use the command nt-vault for that.

nt-vault allows you to securely encrypt sensitive Markdown notes. The encrypted files remain valid Markdown files with a special Front Matter indicating they are encrypted.

# 1. Generate a key
mkdir -p ~/.nt
head -c 32 /dev/urandom > ~/.nt/vault.key
chmod 0600 ~/.nt/vault.key
export NT_VAULT_AES_KEY_FILE=~/.nt/vault.key

# 2. Create a new encrypted note
nt-vault create personal/diary.md

# 3. Edit it in $EDITOR
nt-vault edit personal/diary.md

# 4. View it without editing
nt-vault view personal/diary.md

# 5. Encrypt an existing note
nt-vault encrypt old-note.md

# 6. Decrypt when needed
nt-vault decrypt old-note.md > old-note.md

Tip

How to ensure files are never committed unencrypted?

Add a tag secure at the top of your Markdown file. When running nt add, if a unencrypted file is parsed with the tag secure, the command will fail.

Secured Objects

When using nt-vault, only Markdown files are encrypted. When running nt add on these files, the code will use the AES key to decrypt the content and extracts objects into a packfile. The packfile object present under .nt/objects will not be encrypted. When using nt push, you need to choose carefully your remote if you want to preserve confidentiality (ex: using an object storage solution like Filebase or Storj using a decentralized approach).