sp — Daily Scratchpad

CLI/TUI scratchpad for daily notes, todos, and quick thoughts. Built with Go and the charm.sh toolchain.

Features

• Daily scratchpad: a fresh page per day, kept on disk forever
• Three view modes that drill into one another:
  • Year / month calendar with per-day previews and entry sparklines
  • Notebook viewer with glamour-rendered markdown, scrubbable across pages
  • External editor ($EDITOR) for actually writing
• One semantic rule across the TUI: Enter goes deeper
• Inline editing: hand the editor to tea.ExecProcess, save on exit, resume the same view with a refreshed render — no shell hop between edits
• Light / dark palette swap driven by your terminal: Ctrl+T toggles in-session, SIGUSR1 re-detects, macOS appearance changes are picked up automatically via an fsnotify watcher on the global preferences plist
• Glyph set choice: nerd-font icons or pure-ASCII fallback, set in ~/.sp/config.toml

Installation

Homebrew

brew tap pders01/sp
brew install sp

Build from source

Requires Go 1.24 or later.

git clone https://github.com/pders01/sp.git
cd sp
make install   # → $GOPATH/bin/sp

Or manually:

go build -o sp ./cmd/sp

Usage

sp          # open today's page in $EDITOR
sp -n       # notebook viewer; Enter / e / i opens the editor
sp -c       # calendar; Enter drills into the notebook on that day
sp --version

Flow

sp -c   →   calendar   ──Enter──→   notebook   ──Enter/e/i──→   editor
                ▲ ▲                     │                          │
                │ └────── Esc ──────────┘                          │
                │                                                  │
                └─────── editor exits, view resumes ───────────────┘
            (Calendar 'e' is a power-user shortcut: skip the notebook
             and edit the picked day immediately.)

After the editor saves and exits, the active view repaints with the updated content. Pop from notebook back to calendar with Esc/ Backspace; the calendar cursor follows wherever you were in the notebook.

Key reference

Calendar

Key	Action
←/h →/l	day (month view) / month (year view)
↑/k ↓/j	week (month view) / row (year view)
H L	jump month / year
Enter	drill into the notebook on that day
e i	edit the day immediately (month view)
m y	switch to month / year view
t	reset cursor to today
Ctrl+T	cycle theme: auto → light → dark
q Ctrl+C Esc	quit

Notebook

Key	Action
←/h →/l	previous / next page
↑/k ↓/j	scroll content
Ctrl+u Ctrl+d	half-page up / down
b f pgup/pgdn	full-page up / down
g G	jump to top / bottom
Enter e i	edit current page
Esc Backspace	pop back to calendar (when -c)
Ctrl+T	cycle theme
q Ctrl+C	quit

Configuration

Optional TOML at ~/.sp/config.toml. Missing fields fall back to the defaults shown in config.example.toml:

[ui]
icons = "unicode"   # or "nerd" if you have a Nerd Font installed
theme = "auto"      # "auto" | "light" | "dark"

auto resolves via GLAMOUR_STYLE → COLORFGBG → terminal detection → macOS AppleInterfaceStyle. Send SIGUSR1 (pkill -USR1 sp) to re-detect after a manual switch.

Editor support

sp resolves the editor via $EDITOR, then $VISUAL, then platform-specific fallbacks (vim, nvim, nano, micro, emacs, code, etc.).

export EDITOR=vim
export EDITOR="code --wait"

Caveat: GUI editors that fork-and-detach (VS Code without --wait, Sublime, Atom) will return immediately when invoked from inside the TUI and look broken — tea.ExecProcess waits on the launched process. For those, stick with bare sp (the synchronous path keeps the original GUI polling loop).

Data storage

Scratchpads live in ~/.sp/<YYYY-MM-DD>.json. Each file holds the date, content (raw markdown), and creation / modified timestamps.

Project layout

sp/
├── cmd/sp/                main.go            Cobra entry point
├── internal/
│   ├── config/            config.go          TOML loader
│   ├── editor/            editor.go          editor resolution + Prepare/Edit
│   ├── scratchpad/        scratchpad.go      JSON store, ListDates, Save/Load
│   └── tui/
│       ├── app.go         router model: calendar ↔ notebook ↔ editor
│       ├── calendar.go    full-screen month / year grid
│       ├── notebook.go    glamour viewer with inline edit
│       ├── branding.go    Palette struct + light/dark variants
│       ├── icons.go       IconSet (nerd / unicode)
│       ├── theme.go       glamour style resolution
│       ├── theme_watcher.go  shared SIGUSR1 + plist subscription
│       └── theme_watch_*.go  per-OS plist watchers
├── Makefile               build / test / lint / coverage / release
├── .golangci.yml          mirrors fwrd's lint config
├── .github/workflows/     ci.yml + release.yml
├── config.example.toml
└── .goreleaser.yml

Development

make build       # ./sp
make test        # all packages
make test-race   # race detector
make coverage    # writes coverage.html
make lint        # golangci-lint (fall back to go vet)
make modernize   # gopls source.fixAll
make ci          # deps + lint + test + build

CI matrix runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows; lint pinned to golangci-lint v1.64.8. See RELEASE.md for the GoReleaser flow.

License

MIT