Command line tools

It would be nice if Agenda also had an option for command-line use, for instance to add a note.

agenda --date=2018-01-22 new “Added topic to agenda community about command line tools”

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Whoa, that does sound fancy. Probably not the top priority, but we will keep it on our feature list.

Thanks!

I guess it would be easy for some one to develop that externally if Agenda was scriptable.

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Another vote for good command line tools. I’m taking notes (hah) on other ideas about this app, because it comes pretty close to something I’ve been wanting for a while.

Another important one is a search function (not Spotlight - it needs PCREs and reliability that Spotlight can’t manage, among other things).

But in general a big issue for me is that I am a heavy command line user - I spend a big chunk of my productive workday in the shell. My current notes “solution” is a big folder structure of plain text dating back about 20 years, with a lot of reference, code snippets, checklists of things I did a long time ago, etc. and referencing that stuff is an every day thing for me.

In any case, my own record-keeping issues aside, any working notebook I use is going to have to have fluent command line tools. This probably puts me outside what you see as your core market, but there we are.

Do you want scripting per se, or would you prefer some sort of data representation that you can read and write from the command line, and have it synced up with Agenda app?

I’d say scripting should be the most important thing to add since once that is in place, command line usage and control from e.g. Alfred, LaunchBar, or Keyboard Maestro is easy to implement. To simplify things, it would also be great if Agenda implemented a custom URL scheme to let you do things like agenda://search?tag=abc.

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OK, clear. Thanks for the feedback.

A data model that common command line tools can operate on is ideal to me. That means it is scriptable via bash, python, etc.

Having played with Applescript since inception (back in System 7!), I’d say no to that. Every single time I try to do anything in it I end up wanting to engage in large-scale mayhem. In any case, the cycle of finding/externally operating on contents/sometimes saving changes back is going to cover 95% of what I am looking for.

Nowadays you can also use Javascript as a native scripting language. And there are scripting bridges for Objective-C, Swift, and many other languages. So scripting would be the most universal solution, upon which we could build other stuff.

Swift, objC, etc. are useless for day-to-day automation, and IMO, OAS-based stuff is basically doomed for actual interapp use, no matter what language is grafted on top. I do understand the appeal for a development point of view, and probably makes sense to add, but it doesn’t substitute for something that can be included in an ad-hoc bash pipeline.

This would be totally awesome.

Fantastic idea! Would be awesome if this could get reality. Would make Agenda for me even more a killer app.

Yes well I just tried but was amazed by the fact that only the basic AppleScript stuff is available. Wanted to use it to create a widget for Übersicht…

I should point out that Agenda is quite automate-able via the x-callback-urls. It is true the Apple Script stuff is less broad. Anyone with scripting capabilities can probably do quite a lot just calling to URLs, or using the shortcuts apps.

See X-callback-url Support and Reference - #143 by Badsey

To add to @drewmccormack’s suggestion, you can also combine the two, for example in this AppleScript:

do shell script "open 'agenda://x-callback-url/create-category?title='" & quoted form of "Pianificazione strategica" 

to create a new category called “Pianificazione strategica”