THE CHELUS GUIDE
Write it down. Find it again.
A folder of linked Markdown notes for everything too long for memory: people, projects, places, lists and decisions.
Plain files you can open anywhere
Notes are ordinary .md files with [[wikilinks]], #tags and YAML frontmatter, the format Obsidian, Markor, Logseq and others read. Open the folder in any of them, or point Chelus at a vault you already keep. Chelus needs no editor and doesn’t ship one.
Just ask
Mention something worth keeping, or ask what you know. Chelus searches first, adds to the note on that topic, and creates a note only for a new one. Each reply says what changed:
you Add the Hokusai print to my wish list.
chelus Done.
added to the end of Lists/Wish list.It can create, add to, edit, rename and move notes. Moving a note rewrites every link to it across the folder, and a move that touches more than 20 notes asks first. Trashing moves a note into the folder’s .trash. Nothing is erased.
Filed in the background
Every ten messages by default, a background review reads the conversation. Details you mentioned in passing, like a friend’s new job, go into the note about them. Additions are saved at once and reported. Edits and rewrites wait for your approval under /pending, as a card with the diff, and approving one does nothing if you changed the note in the meantime.
Keep the folder tidy
chelus notes
chelus notes --check
chelus notes "Dana Okafor"The check lists links that point at nothing, notes nothing links to, names used by more than one note, and notes search can’t read. It never fixes anything. In Telegram, use /notes, /notes check and /note NAME. The weekly curator sends the check when its findings change.
Where the notes live
The folder is ~/.local/share/chelus/notes by default, private to Termux and off limits to the general file tools. The search index is a cache in ~/.cache/chelus/notes.sqlite3; deleting it loses nothing. On the A10e a 2,000-note folder indexes in about 19 seconds and searches in about 210 milliseconds.
Setting notes_dir to a folder in shared storage lets you edit notes in Markor or sync them with Syncthing, but other apps can read shared storage too. Android can also leave Termux able to write there but not list folders while Settings shows Storage as allowed. The notes tools say so, and switching Storage to Deny and back to Allow fixes it. This setup hasn’t been verified on a phone yet.
Turn notes off with notes = false. Guests never see them. The design is in docs/NOTES.md.