Scratchpad to Database

I love the terminal, but I still spend half my day in Sublime Text. When an idea appears I hit Cmd+N to open a blank, unsaved buffer and start typing.

Saving it on the other hand, that is a friction point for me: File → Save As → choose a folder → name the file → confirm → then remember where it actually went.

I wanted to skip the filesystem entirely. So I wrote a small Python plugin for Sublime that talks directly to medi.

The frictionless workflow

Write: I jot down thoughts in a fresh, untitled tab.
Push: I press Cmd+Shift+m.
Name: A tiny input bar appears: Medi key? I type meeting-notes (or whatever so i can get back to it easily).
Done: The text is pushed straight into my sled database via medi import.

That’s it.

The plugin is also sticky: it remembers which medi key an individual tab belongs to. If I keep writing and hit the shortcut again, it simply updates the database.

In practice, Sublime Text becomes a GUI frontend for my CLI database, giving me the speed of a text editor with the structure of medi underneath.

A small caveat

This workflow is only meant for scratch files I decide to keep. Quick notes, meeting minutes, loose thoughts, etc. For proper writing, especially Markdown documents, I still use my usual flow. This isn’t a replacement for that; it’s a way to reduce friction when capturing throwaway notes that turn out not to be so throwaway.

Technical note

Under the hood, the plugin writes the buffer to a temporary file and runs:

medi import --file tmp.md --key <key> --overwrite

This means every edit runs through medi’s normal logic for tagging, indexing, and consistency.

The plugin is available here as a gist: https://gist.github.com/cladam/204ca7d09608f130ecc76b6c7095cea0