Notulist - Record notes from your terminal

Notulist is a CLI-based note taking application for terminal power-users. You can now easily record quick notes via the terminal or your favorite editor. After collecting notes, you can let AI organize them for you into projects, and your journal automatically.

The application features a journal section that records daily and monthly summaries for you based on the notes collected so you always have a clear overview of what happened in the past days or weeks. In addition to the journal, you can organize notes into projects or archive them by date so you can refer to them at any point.

I made notulist in such a way that you can link it to Claude Code and let your agent do the note taking for you. Claude Code is also used to organize the notes based on customizable instructions stored in the application's configuration directory.

Requirements

• Python 3.14+
• Claude Code

Installation

pip install notulist

Usage

Initialize a notes repository

Before you can take notes, you should initialize a directory as the notes repository for the application. First, create a new directory for your notes, and then use the following command to initialize the new directory as a notes repository:

notulist init

This creates the following directory structure:

today/           # inbox for today's notes
journal/daily/   # daily journal entries
journal/monthly/ # monthly journal entries
projects/        # project-specific notes
archive/         # archived notes organized by date

You can synchronize the directory using Git. Use git init in the notes repository to initialize it as a Git repository, and then commit and push as normal.

Make sure to review the config.toml file and configure your editor of choice. You can find the configuration file in ~/.config/notulist/config.toml on Mac/Linux and in %USERPROFILE%/.notulist/config.toml on Windows. Refer to the configuration section for more details on the configuration format for the application.

Create a note

The application offers two ways to create notes. You can write a note inline:

notulist note -m "Remember to review the API design doc"

Claude Code will automatically generate a title for your note so you can find it again. Add the -t <title> option to provide a title yourself. You can also create a new note using a text editor of your choice.

uv run notulist note

Manage projects

The application can organize notes into projects for you automatically. You can create a new project with this command:

notulist projects create -n "API Redesign" -d "Notes on the v2 API migration"

Or omit -d to open the configured editor for a longer description.

You can list all commands with the following command:

notulist projects ls

You can remove a project when you no longer need it. We'll ask for confirmation if it contains notes.

notulist projects remove -n api-redesign

Organize notes

After collecting notes, you can use the following command to organize the notes into projects and your journal:

notulist organize

This command:

1. Generates daily summaries in journal/daily/ for each date found in today/.
2. Generates monthly summaries in journal/monthly/.
3. Classifies each note into a matching project (moved to projects/<slug>/) or archives it (moved to archive/<date>/).

Summaries and classification are powered by Claude Code.

Configuration

The application reads settings from ~/.config/notulist/config.toml (Linux/macOS) or ~/.notulist/config.toml (Windows), and from environment variables. Make sure to review the settings after running notulist init to make sure the application uses the editor you'd like to use.

Available settings:

Key	Default	Description
editor	vi (Linux/macOS), notepad (Windows)	Editor command for composing notes
repository	~/notes	Path to the notes repository

Example config.toml:

editor = "nvim"
repository = "/home/user/my-notes"

Prompt customization

You can customize the prompts we use for organizing your notes by editing the files in ~/.config/notulist/prompts on Mac/Linux or %USERPROFILE%/.notulist/prompts on Windows.