choom 0.0.4

A corporate-friendly Markdown notes engine that makes your AI happy.

choom

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KEEP YOUR CORPO OVERLORDS HAPPY, FEED YOUR AI

A corporate-friendly Markdown notes engine that makes your AI happy.

A choom is Night City slang for a good friend — the one who's got your back. That's the job here: keeping you organized and your AI fed with context, corpo restrictions notwithstanding.

A local-only, terminal-based tool for capturing and organizing meeting notes, general notes, and tasks as plain markdown files — structured enough for a human to navigate through a TUI, and legible enough that an AI assistant can search and edit the vault through a CLI without any integration work.

Why

Markdown is the native format of AI assistants — they read it, write it, diff it, and reason over it without an adapter layer. Almost nobody at a large company can actually work that way, because the sanctioned note-taking tools (OneNote, Confluence, SharePoint) lock notes behind proprietary formats and authenticated APIs, and markdown-first apps like Obsidian or Logseq are rarely on the approved-software list.

choom installs without admin rights, stores nothing outside a directory you already have, and needs no server or account — just a folder.

The tool disappears into the twenty seconds before a meeting starts. You type /meeting.standup Q3 planning #platform, a file exists with correct frontmatter and a date-stamped name, and you're typing notes before anyone has finished joining the call. You never decide where a file goes or what to call it.

Usage

Install

Requires Python 3.11+. Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with no network access needed after install.

uv tool install choom

Coming from v0.0.1, when this project was called endpaper? Rename the workspace marker directory — mv .endpaper .choom from the workspace root — and nothing else about the workspace changes. Ids written under the old m_/n_/t_ prefixes keep resolving alongside the new meeting_/note_/task_ ones; no existing file is rewritten.

Create a workspace

Cloud-synced folder? Pin it to this device first. choom has no index — every command reads whichever files are actually present, so a file that is only a cloud placeholder is invisible to it, and to any assistant reading the folder. Turn off on-demand/online-only storage for the workspace folder: OneDrive → "Always keep on this device"; Dropbox → "Make available offline"; Google Drive → "Available offline"; iCloud Drive → keep it downloaded and exclude it from "Optimize Mac Storage" (or it may be evicted later).

mkdir notes && cd notes
choom init

This creates .choom/config.toml, AGENTS.md, and meetings/ in the current directory. This directory is now your workspace root — every command below runs from inside it.

Capture a meeting

choom meeting new "Q3 planning" --type standup --tag platform

Prints the path to the new file: meetings/2026-07-28-standup-q3-planning.md, already stamped with frontmatter (id, type, title, tags, created, updated).

Browse and list

choom meeting list --json
choom meeting list --type standup --since 2026-07-01

Or launch the TUI with no arguments:

choom

choom opens on Tasks; tab/shift+tab cycle the top bar between Tasks, Notes, and Meetings, whose path sits flush right in that same bar so you always know which workspace you're in. Each collection lists its records as four labelled columns — date, type, title, tags — that hold their position whether or not a record has a type or tags; on a narrow terminal the lower-priority columns drop before the date or title ever get squeezed. For Notes and Meetings the left pane lists months, most-recent-first, and only the month on screen is read from disk — a workspace with years of history costs the same to open as an empty one.

/ opens a permanent command bar — type filter <term> (or f <term>) to narrow the list live, or meeting.standup <description> and hit enter to create one, landing straight in the editor. Arrow keys move, enter opens the selected record in a rendered markdown preview, e drops into a raw editor from either the list or the preview, b toggles a pane showing what the record points at and what points back at it, ctrl+d deletes the highlighted record after a one-line confirmation naming it, ctrl+o/ctrl+x save, esc backs out. Every confirmation in the tool — discarding unsaved edits, deleting a record — is that same slim, centred bar: one question, (Esc) to stop and (Enter) to proceed, nothing to click. /help lists every command and key binding without leaving the screen, and the running version sits in the bottom-right corner.

Ask an assistant from inside the document

Type /ai <prompt> on its own line in the editor and press enter:

The document saves, whichever assistant CLI you already have installed runs the prompt, and the reply lands where the command was:

While it works, the line shows ⋯ and the status bar offers ctrl+c to cancel. Cancelling — or any failure — restores the line exactly as you typed it, so a prompt is never lost.

For AI assistants

An assistant working in a choom workspace reads AGENTS.md at the root and takes it from there — non-interactive, --json-capable, and scriptable by design. Nothing opens an editor or blocks on a prompt.

Below, an assistant is asked to pull up a vendor sync meeting, research the competitor options it calls for, and write up its findings — reading and writing the vault the same way it reads and writes a codebase:

The note it produced shows up like any other — because it is:

Run choom --help for the full command reference. The AGENTS.md that init writes into your workspace documents the folder layout, the frontmatter schema, the task line format, link syntax, and the exit codes.

Features (v0.0.4)

• Meeting notes — /meeting.standup Q3 planning #platform creates a dated, frontmatter-tagged file and drops you straight into the editor. Browse with /meetings or tab; the left pane lists months, most-recent-first; /filter <term> (or /f <term>) narrows across every month; open with enter.
• General notes — /note opens (or creates) today's daily note; /note.research vendor landscape #procurement creates a typed note. Browse with /notes or tab.
• Tasks — /task.followup send the vendor comparison #procurement appends a checkbox line to tasks.md. /tasks or tab opens on To-Do; space toggles a task done, moving it to the Done category in the left pane. A task can carry an optional markdown body — details, a running log — stored as indented lines beneath its checkbox line; it renders in the preview pane when the task is highlighted, and e opens the editor scoped to just that body. Empty until you type something, and a save that changes nothing writes nothing. choom task show <id> prints a task and its body from the CLI; task list --json carries body on every entry. The file stays hand-editable plain markdown — no database. Completing a task moves its record out of tasks.md into a per-day file under tasks/done/YYYY/MM/, so the open list you read every day doesn't carry a year of finished work; un-completing moves it back. Every checklist mirror elsewhere still resolves by its #task_<id> fragment, never by path, so nothing else in the workspace needs to know a task moved.
• Inline task capture — inside any meeting or note, typing /task <description> (or /task.<type> <description>) on its own line and pressing enter captures a task without leaving the editor: the line becomes a checklist item linking to it, - [ ] [call Terry about the renewal](../../../tasks.md#task_a1b2), cursor at its end, nothing else on screen moving. Prefix an existing line with /task.followup to promote its own words into the task instead. That checklist item is a two-way control surface, not a copy — tick it and save, or tick the task from the tasks list, and the other side follows; opening a document brings every mirror in it into agreement with tasks.md first, so nothing shown is ever stale, with no repair command and no background process. choom task add "<description>" --link <id> does the same capture from the command line, and task done/undone --json report which documents were updated. The same syntax is available to /ai: a /task line an assistant writes in its reply is captured exactly as if you had typed it, and the reply comes back with a real, linked task in place of that line.
• Document links — any record can point at any other, as an ordinary markdown link: See [Q3 planning](../../../meetings/2026/07/2026-07-28-q3-planning.md#meeting_20260728_a1b2c3d4). The #id fragment is what choom resolves and never changes; the path is derived so the link is clickable in any plain markdown viewer, and it's recomputed whenever the target moves. Write just the fragment — [Q3 planning](#meeting_20260728_a1b2c3d4) — and the path fills itself in on the next save; nobody has to count ../. b opens a pane of outbound and inbound links in any preview, /link <search terms> inserts a correct link without leaving the editor — when the terms match more than one record, a short list rises in the same status-bar region instead of failing closed, showing each candidate's title, collection, and date, with ↑/↓ to move, enter to insert, and esc to leave the typed line untouched — and choom links <id> --direction in answers what points at a record from the command line. choom links check separates stale links (fixable) from dead ones (need a decision) and choom links heal repairs every stale one. Nothing is indexed or cached — inbound links are computed by scanning, measured at 155 ms across 6,000 documents. Saving a document also turns any bare http:///https:// URL in the text into a real markdown link automatically, so pasted URLs render as links everywhere without extra syntax — code spans, existing links, and frontmatter are left alone.
• Workspace init — choom init sets up a workspace (config, AGENTS.md, meetings/, notes/daily/, tasks.md) in the current directory. Multi-user shared workspaces are planned but not yet built — tracked in issue #18.
• View and edit — highlighting a record and pressing e opens the editor in place of the preview pane — the list, the links pane, and the top bar all stay on screen, and the highlighted row never moves. Opening a record full-screen first (enter, then e) still edits full-screen. Line numbers, soft wrap, and ctrl+o (stay) / ctrl+x (save and return) work the same either way. The cursor starts on an empty line one blank line below whatever is already there, so appending a thought costs no cursor-movement keystrokes. esc discards, but only prompts when there's something to lose; ctrl+q prompts the same way rather than quitting outright when it would discard an unsaved edit. ctrl+s is also bound as a save alias, but ctrl+o is the canonical key: some terminals treat ctrl+s as the legacy XOFF flow-control signal and swallow it before it ever reaches choom. If saves with ctrl+s seem to do nothing, run stty -ixon in that shell (or use ctrl+o instead).
• Vertical layout for narrow windows — /config view vertical rearranges the list screen for a half-width window: the collection bar stays across the top, the scope list and record list sit side by side in an upper band, and the preview/edit region moves to a full-width band beneath them. /config view horizontal restores the default three-panes-across layout. The choice persists across sessions as per-user local state, not workspace config, since it's a property of your monitor rather than something a collaborator sharing the workspace should inherit. On a terminal too short for either layout, choom falls back to horizontal until it's resized taller.
• Delete a record — ctrl+d on a highlighted meeting, note, or task in the TUI raises a one-line confirmation naming it; confirm and it's gone, decline and nothing changes. choom meeting delete <id> --force (note/task the same way) does it from the command line — the flag is required, so the command never prompts and never blocks. Deleting a task leaves its checklist mirrors elsewhere untouched, in whatever words you wrote them, rather than rewriting or stripping your line. There's no trash and no undo: once confirmed, the record is gone.
• Delete a task from the editor — with the cursor on a task's checklist line inside a document editor, ctrl+t removes that task from both the document and the task list, after one confirmation. Unlike ctrl+d, this works from inside the document you're already editing rather than the list view, and it only ever touches the one line the cursor is on.
• AI-friendly CLI — every TUI action has a non-interactive CLI equivalent backed by the same core library: --json on every read command, meaningful exit codes, data on stdout and errors on stderr, nothing that opens an editor or blocks on input. Assistants create records through the commands, so frontmatter and file placement stay correct, then edit the markdown bodies directly like any other file.
• /ai in the editor — type /ai <prompt> on its own line and press enter: the document saves, your already-installed Claude Code CLI or GitHub Copilot CLI runs the prompt, and the reply lands where the command was. The line shows ⋯ and the status bar names a random breadcrumb plus ctrl+c to cancel while it works; every failure — cancelled, no reply, the assistant errored — restores the line exactly as typed. Which assistant to call is detected automatically when only one is installed, or set explicitly with choom config assistant <claude|copilot|none> (CLI) or /config assistant <value> (TUI command bar) — a workspace with neither tool installed keeps every other feature unchanged.
• Assistant discovery file — naming an assistant (choom config assistant <claude|copilot>, /config assistant <value>, or choom init --assistant <value>) also drops a short, choom-owned pointer into that assistant's own user-scope location outside the workspace — ~/.claude/skills/choom/SKILL.md for Claude Code, ~/.copilot/skills/choom/SKILL.md for Copilot CLI — so the assistant knows choom exists and where this workspace is even when started from an unrelated directory. It restates nothing AGENTS.md already says, is rewritten in full every time the assistant is (re)configured, and setting the assistant to none removes it. On a machine with exactly one assistant installed and none configured, choom offers to install it once, at first launch, through the same confirmation bar used everywhere else in the TUI — answered or not, it's never asked again.
• No index, no database — the markdown files are the only state; nothing to corrupt, nothing to reindex. Every list load and every document open reads straight from disk at that moment, not from a snapshot taken at launch, so a change made by an assistant (or by hand) in another process shows up the next time you look. An open list also re-reads on its own every 2 seconds, re-rendering only when something actually changed and holding your selection steady; typing into the command bar's filter never stalls waiting on this, since the pool it searches is hydrated in the background as soon as the bar opens.
• AGENTS.md — generated at init, under ~100 lines, so an assistant landing in the workspace is productive immediately.
• Terminal tab shows your workspace — choom sets the terminal tab/window title to choom — <workspace name> at startup and restores whatever was there before on exit, so a long-lived session is identifiable in a crowded tab strip. It's set once at startup and doesn't track the active collection, month, or filter as they change.

Everything above has landed on main as of v0.0.4 — see Releases for what has been published to PyPI.

License

See LICENSE.