Anatomy of a build notes file

Howzit relies on there being a file in the current directory with a name that starts with "build" or "howzit" and an extension of .md, .txt, or .markdown, e.g. buildnotes.md or howzit.txt. This note contains topics such as "Build" and "Deploy" with brief notes about each topic in Markdown (or just plain text) format.

Tip: Add "buildprivate.md" to your global gitignore (git config --get core.excludesfile). In a project where you don't want to share your build notes, just name the file "buildprivate.md" instead of "buildnotes.md" and it will automatically be ignored.

If there are files that match the "build*" pattern that should not be recognized as build notes by howzit, add them to ~/.config/howzit/ignore.yaml. This file is a simple list of patterns that should be ignored when scanning for build note files. Use (?:i) at the beginning of a pattern to make it case insensitive.

The topics of the notes are delineated by Markdown headings, level 2 or higher, with the heading being the title of the topic. I split all of mine apart with h2s. For example, a short one from the little website I was working on yesterday:

# Project title

Project summary.

## Build

gulp js: compiles and minifies all js to dist/js/main.min.js

gulp css: compass compile to dist/css/

gulp watch

gulp (default): [css,js]

## Deploy

gulp sync: rsync /dist/ to scoffb.local

## Package management

yarn

## Components

- UIKit

Howzit expects there to only be one header level used to split topics. Anything before the first header is ignored. If your topics use h2 (##), you can use a single h1 (#) line at the top to title the project.

See @commands for info on using Howzit as a task runner for automation.