Nine Point Labs
The Word from Ninepoint Labs

Idea: a CLI for the “wait, I had something” moments

· 2 min read

You know the feeling. You’re three levels deep in a terminal, wiring up some pipeline, and an idea pops into your head: “I should really automate that database migration.” Or maybe “What if the cron job just emailed the digest instead?” By the time you finish what you’re doing, the thought is gone, replaced by whatever error message you’re now staring at.

Ideas on GitHub is the smallest possible answer to that problem. It’s a single Go binary that appends numbered ideas to a markdown file. No database, no daemon, no web UI. Just idea "your thought here" and you’re back to work.

How it works

idea "Add retry logic to the API client"
idea "Switch the blog to folderblog instead of Hugo"
idea "Write a cron job that posts a daily project highlight"

Each one gets the next number. When you want to see them:

idea -l

And when you’ve actually done the thing, or decided it was a terrible idea after all:

idea -r 2         # remove idea 2
idea -r 1-3       # remove ideas 1 through 3
idea -r 1,5,9     # remove specific ones

After removal, the remaining ideas renumber themselves from 1. It’s all atomic, too: if any number in your range is invalid, nothing gets removed. No half-done cleanups.

Why it’s great

It’s written in Go with zero dependencies beyond the standard library. The binary is small, the build is instant, and the storage format is just a markdown file under a # Ideas heading in ~/Documents/Ideas/ideas.md. You can point it anywhere with IDEAS_FILE if you want per-project idea files. There’s nothing to break, nothing to upgrade, and nothing to regret installing.

Sometimes the best tool is the one that does exactly one thing and then gets out of your way. Ideas doesn’t try to be Notion. It doesn’t try to organize, categorize, prioritize, or remind. It just writes down the thing you thought of so you can get back to the thing you were doing.

Install

git clone https://github.com/ninepointlabs/ideas.git
cd ideas
make build
sudo make install

That’s it. idea lands in /usr/local/bin and you’re ready to stop losing thoughts to the void.

Grab it at github.com/ninepointlabs/ideas and give your stray thoughts a home.