I like to use OmniOutliner as a lab notebook, and I like to be able to create/open notebooks from the command line. The OS X ‘open’ command will open an existing file, but I didn’t see any obvious way to run OmniOutliner from the command line and tell it to create a new file. So I created an empty OmniOutliner file and dropped in ~/Documents/template, then wrote a little script to copy that template and open it if it doesn’t exist, or open the pre-existing file if it does. Simple and effective.
#!/usr/bin/env groovy
/********************************************
* A simple little script to open up a file in OmniOutliner
* creating a default file if the file does not already exist.
*
* Run it like:
*
* omni newNotebook
*/
def omniFile
if (args[0].contains(".oo3")){
omniFile = args[0]
}else{
omniFile = "${args[0]}.oo3"
}
// Get our home directory..
env = System.getenv()
home = env['HOME']
// If there is no omni outline file there, copy a template over...
if (!(new File(omniFile).exists())){
"cp -r $home/Documents/templates/OOTemplate.oo3/ ${omniFile}".execute()
}
// Open the desired file..
"open ${omniFile}".execute()