medi

About

[[medi]] is a fast, editor-centric, command-line notes manager.

medi is a simple and powerful tool for creating and managing your notes, articles, and documentation directly from the terminal. It's built for developers, writers, and anyone who loves the speed and focus of a command-line workflow.

Philosophy

medi is built on a few guiding principles:

• CLI-first: Everything is done through the terminal. No GUIs or TUIs, no distractions.
• Editor-centric: Your text editor ($EDITOR) is where you write. medi gets you there quickly and saves your work securely.
• Local & private: All content is stored on your local machine in a high-performance embedded database. No cloud services, no network access.
• Zero-config start: Install it and start writing immediately.

Features ✨

• Create & Manage Notes: Quickly create new notes using a simple command (medi new <note-key>). You can add content directly with a flag, pipe it from other commands, or open your favorite text editor for more detailed entries.
• Powerful Organisation: Keep your notes tidy with tags. Add multiple tags when creating a note (--tag) and easily add or remove them later (medi edit --add-tag ...).
• Integrated Task Management: Turn your notes into actionable to-do lists. Add tasks to any note ( medi task add ...), list all your pending items, mark them as complete (medi task done ...), and set priorities to focus on what's important.
• Full-text Search: Instantly find what you're looking for with a powerful search command (medi search <term>) that scans the content of all your notes.
• Import & Export: medi is not a data silo. You can easily import entire directories of Markdown files to get started, and export all your notes back to Markdown or JSON at any time.
• List & Review: Get a clean, sorted list of all your notes (medi list) or view the content of any specific note ( medi get <note-key>).
• Finding Connections & Notes: Use [[wiki-like]] syntax to link back to a note, and use a fuzzy finder to quickly find and edit a note by its key.
• Colourful & Clear Output: Uses coloured output to clearly distinguish between success messages, information, warnings, and errors.

How It Works, DB as Source-of-Truth

medi uses a database-first approach. All your notes are stored in a sled key-value database, making access fast and reliable. This database is the single source of truth.

To version control your work with Git, medi provides a simple and deliberate workflow:

• Write: Use medi new and medi edit to manage your notes.
• Export: Run medi export ./my-notes to write all your notes to a local directory as .md files.
• Commit: Use Git to commit the exported directory, giving you a complete, version-controlled snapshot of your work.

Installation

You need Rust and Cargo installed.

Installing from crates.io

The easiest way to install medi is to download it from crates.io. You can do it using the following command:

cargo install medi

If you want to update medi to the latest version, execute the following command:

medi update

Building from source

Alternatively you can build medi from source using Cargo:

git clone https://github.com/cladam/medi.git
cd medi
sudo cargo install --path . --root /usr/local

Configuration

On the first run, medi will automatically create a default configuration file at the standard location for your operating system:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/medi/config.toml
• Linux: ~/.config/medi/config.toml
• Windows: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\medi\config.toml

You can edit this file to customize medi's behaviour.

Example config.toml

# Path to the database file.
# You can change this to store your notes in a different location,
# for example, inside a cloud-synced folder like Dropbox.
db_path = "/Users/cladam/Library/Application Support/medi/medi_db"

# Default directory for the `medi export` command.
# If this is set, you can run `medi export` without specifying a path.
# Leave it as an empty string ("") if you don't want a default.
default_export_dir = "/Users/cladam/Documents/medi_backups"

Usage

Creating and Editing Notes

• Create a new note

  medi provides three ways to create a new note:

  1. Interactively (default): Opens your default editor for long-form content.

     medi new "my-long-article"
     # With tags: Add tags to your note for better organisation.
     medi new "my-long-article" --tag tag1 --tag tag2
     # With a title: Specify a title for your note.
     medi new "my-long-article" --title "My Long Article"
     

  2. With a direct message: Perfect for quick, one-line notes.

     medi new quick-idea -m "Remember to buy milk"
     

  3. From a pipe: Use the output of other commands as your note content.

     echo "This is a note from a pipe" | medi new piped-note
     

• Edit an existing note

  medi edit "my-long-article"
  
  # Add tags to a note
  medi edit "my-long-article" --add-tag tag1 --add-tag tag2
  
  # Remove tags from a note
  medi edit "my-long-article" --rm-tag tag1 --rm-tag tag2
  

Using Templates 📝

medi can create new notes from predefined templates to speed up your workflow. On its first run, medi creates an example meeting.md template in the configuration directory.

• Location of templates:

  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/medi/templates/
  • Linux: ~/.config/medi/templates/
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\medi\templates\

• Create a note from a template:

  medi new my-project-meeting --template meeting
  

• Create your own templates: Simply add any .md file to your templates directory. If you create blog.md, you can use it with medi new ... --template blog.

Finding, Viewing & Listing Notes

⚠️ This feature is not supported on Windows.

• Interactively find a note Open a fuzzy finder to quickly search for and edit a note by its key.

  medi find
  

  This will open an interactive TUI to help you find the note you want to edit.

• Get a note's content Prints the note directly to the console. This is perfect for piping to other tools.

  medi get "my-first-article"
  
  # Pipe to a Markdown renderer like mdcat
  medi get "my-first-article" | mdcat
  
  # Get a note in Json format
  medi get "my-first-article" --json
  
  # Get one or several notes via a tag
  medi get --tag my-tag
  

• List all notes The list command provides a rich overview of your notes, including their keys and tags.

  medi list
  

  Output:

  - cladam_github_io_readme [#blog #project]
  - medi-blogpost [#rust]
  

• Sort your notes You can sort the list by creation or last modification date using the --sort-by flag. The default is to sort alphabetically by key.

  # Sort by the most recently modified notes
  medi list --sort-by modified
  
  # Sort by when the notes were created
  medi list --sort-by created
  

Searching & Indexing

medi includes a full-text search engine (tantivy) that lets you find notes by their content, title, or tags.

Search for a note

# Find all notes containing the word "rust"
medi search rust

# Search for a phrase
medi search "database design"

Output:

Search Results:
- medi-blogpost
- rust-cli-ideas

Rebuild the search index

If your search index ever gets out of sync or you're setting up medi for the first time with an existing database, you can rebuild the entire index.

medi reindex

Deleting a Note

• Delete a note You will be prompted for confirmation.

  medi delete "my-first-article"
  
  # Skip the confirmation prompt
  medi delete "my-first-article" --force
  

Versioning with Export/Import

• Export all notes to a directory Creates a version-controllable snapshot of your database.

  medi export ./my_notes_backup
  cd my_notes_backup
  tbdflow init
  

• Export all notes to a Json document

  medi export medi-export --format json
  

• Export notes via a tag

  medi export medi-export --tag my-tag
  

• Import notes from a directory Restores notes from a directory of .md files.

  # By default, skips any notes that already exist
  medi import --dir /path/to/notes
  
  # Import a single
  medi import --file /path/to/note.md --key my-note
  
  # Overwrite existing notes with the imported versions
  medi import --file /path/to/note.md --key my-note --overwrite
  

Task Management

medi includes a simple task manager to help you turn notes into actionable to-do lists.

• Add a task to a note

  medi task add my-blog-post "Finish the conclusion section"
  

• List all tasks

  The list is sorted by priority and status.

  medi task list
  

  Output:

  Tasks:
  [42] [Prio] ⭐ : Review final draft (for note 'medi-readme')
  [43] [Open] : Add usage examples (for note 'medi-readme')
  [44] [Done] : Write introduction (for note 'my-blog-post')
  

• Prioritise a task

  medi task prio 43
  

• Complete a task

  medi task done 43
  

• Delete a task

  medi task delete 43
  

• Clear all tasks

  This is a destructive action

  medi task reset
  

Checking Status

The status command provides a high-level overview of your database or detailed statistics for a single note.

• Get a global overview:

  medi status
  

  Output:

  medi status
    Notes: 42
    Tasks: 8 open (3 priority)
  

• Get stats for a specific note:

  medi status medi-blogpost
  

  Output:

  medi-blogpost
    Key: medi-blogpost
    Tags: rust, cli
    Words: 584
    Reading Time: ~3 minute(s)
    Created: Mon, 12 Sep 2025 10:30:00 +0200
    Modified: Tue, 13 Sep 2025 15:00:00 +0200
  

Discover Connections

• Find backlinks for a note Discover all the notes that link to a specific topic using [[wiki-link]] syntax.

  medi backlinks rust
  

  Output:

  Found 1 backlinks for 'rust':
  - medi-project
  

Markdown Linting

medi can check your notes for common Markdown issues using rumdl.

• Lint a specific note

  medi lint my-blog-post
  

• Lint all notes

  medi lint
  

Formatting and fixing the issues is left to your editor or other tools.

Markdown Preview

medi includes a simple preview mode using egui to render your Markdown notes in a window.

• Preview a note

  medi preview my-blog-post
  

Shell Completion

To make medi even faster to use, you can enable shell completion. Add one of the following lines to your shell's configuration file.

For Zsh (~/.zshrc):

eval "$(medi generate-completion zsh)"

For Bash (~/.bashrc):

eval "$(medi generate-completion bash)"

For Fish (~/.config/fish/config.fish):

medi generate-completion fish | source

Project Roadmap 🗺️

This section tracks the implementation status of medi's features. Contributions are welcome!

• All core commands (new, get, list, edit, delete, import, export).

• Configuration file for settings (e.g. database path).

• Support for note metadata (tags, creation dates).

• export notes by tag.

• Full-text search over note content.

• Implement a task command for tracking the status of notes.

• Implement a simple status command

• Add a Fuzzy Finder for notes

• Add templates for different documents

• Wiki-Style Linking

• Linting of notes

• A preview mode using egui

• ... your idea here?