Building a Real Notes CLI App with Rust — From Scratch to Exporting PDF

🧠 Why I Built This Project

As a software engineer diving deeper into Rust, I wanted more than tutorials — I needed something real. I chose to build a command-line app for managing notes: something useful, practical, and just complex enough to explore Rust's true power.

🚀 What This CLI App Does

This isn't your basic "Hello, world!" project. Here's what my Notes CLI tool can do:

• Add structured notes with a title, body, and tags

• Track created and updated timestamps

• Search by tag or keyword

• Export all notes to PDF, CSV, or Markdown

• Automatically open the PDF after exporting

Everything runs in the terminal, powered by Rust and a clean modular codebase.

🦀 Rust Concepts I Practiced

I didn't just build an app — I learned the language:

✅ struct and enum

Used for representing notes, user status, and CLI command types. Rust makes it easy (and fun) to model your data clearly.

✅ clap

My CLI parser of choice. clap made it elegant to define arguments like --add-note, --export-pdf, or --search-tag.

✅ serde + serde_json

These two made serializing notes into JSON a breeze — and loading them back just as easy.

✅ chrono

For managing timestamps: when a note was created, and when it was last updated.

✅ File I/O

Reading and writing .json, .csv, .md, and even generating .pdf — I used std::fs, OpenOptions, and Rust's amazing safety net to keep file operations solid.

🔥 Cool Features I’m Proud Of

• --open-pdf — after export, the file opens automatically depending on your OS

• Structured JSON notes with IDs, timestamps, and tags

• --search-tag and --search let you filter notes in real time

• Auto-generated PDFs with Arabic text support (using custom fonts)

💥 What Was Hard

PDF Generation with Arabic

Getting genpdf to work with Arabic fonts was tricky. The default fonts don’t support RTL languages, so I had to bundle in a proper font like Amiri and load it manually.

Ownership + Borrowing

I thought I understood ownership until I started passing structs around. It took some trial and error, and a lot of & vs &mutmoments, but I finally got it.

CLI Design

Making a CLI app feel "usable" and not like a bunch of flags glued together took some planning. Having --add-note, --search-tag, --export-pdf, and --delete-note as separate pathways made it easier to maintain and test.

📦 Libraries Used

• clap – CLI argument parsing

• serde + serde_json – for note storage

• chrono – time tracking

• csv – export to spreadsheets

• genpdf – PDF generation with custom fonts

🧾 Final Thoughts

This project taught me more about Rust than any tutorial could. It made abstract concepts real. Now, when I see impl, Result, match, or a lifetimed reference, I know what it means — and I know I’ve built something real with it.

If you’re learning Rust and want to make something useful, build a CLI tool. You’ll get hands-on with the core of the language and end up with a project that’s truly yours.

🔗 Check it out: github.com/RawanAlrajeh/user-cli-rust

Built with ❤️ by Rawan Alrajeh