NoteWise stores two categories of persistent state on disk: a SQLite cache that tracks processed videos and transcripts, and structured log files that record each session. Both live inside the state directory at ~/.notewise/ by default.
Override the state directory for all state (cache, logs, config) by setting the NOTEWISE_HOME environment variable:export NOTEWISE_HOME=/data/notewise
Cache
Location
The cache database is a single SQLite file:
~/.notewise/.notewise_cache.db
process on a URL that’s already cached, NoteWise skips fetching the transcript and jumps straight to note generation — or skips the whole video if notes already exist.
Inspecting the cache
Show cache summary
Displays the database location, file size, and counts of videos, transcripts, runs, and exports, along with the oldest and newest cached timestamps.
Show a specific cached video
notewise cache --show VIDEO_ID
VIDEO_ID with the YouTube video ID (the v= value from the URL). Shows the video title, duration, transcript status, run count, latest model used, and latest cost.
Clearing and pruning
Delete the entire cache
Prompts for confirmation before deleting the database file (and any SQLite WAL/SHM sidecar files). Pass --yes to skip the prompt:
notewise cache --clear --yes
Clearing the cache is irreversible. After clearing, all previously processed videos will be treated as new and reprocessed on the next run.
Prune stale entries by age
Remove cache entries that were last accessed more than a given number of days ago:
notewise cache --prune 30
Viewing processing history and statistics
Two additional commands read from the cache database:
# Show recently processed videos (default: last 10)
notewise history
# Show more entries
notewise history --limit 25
# Show aggregate processing statistics
notewise stats
# Filter stats to a specific model
notewise stats --model gpt-4o
# Filter stats to the last 7 days
notewise stats --since 7
notewise stats shows totals for videos processed, LLM tokens used, estimated cost, transcript fetch time, and generation time — broken down by model.
Logs
Location
Each NoteWise session writes a structured log file to:
Log files are named with a notewise prefix and a timestamp, for example notewise-2024-01-15T14-32-00.log. The current session’s log file is created when configure_logging() is called at the start of a process run.
Listing recent logs
Lists up to 5 recent log files with their size and last-modified timestamp, and prints the total size of all log files in the directory.
Tailing the latest log
Prints the last 50 lines of the most recent log file directly in the terminal. Useful for quickly checking what happened in the last run without opening a file.
# Show only the last 20 lines
notewise logs --tail 20
Opening the log directory
Opens the log directory in your system’s file manager (Finder on macOS, your default file manager on Linux, Explorer on Windows).
Cleaning up old logs
Remove logs older than N days
notewise logs clean --older-than 7
Remove all inactive logs
notewise logs clean --all
Health check
The doctor command gives a quick overview of all persistent state in one place — config file, API key, output directory, cache database, and log directory:
It checks whether each item is present and functional, and prints a summary with OK, WARN, or FAIL status for each check. Run this first if something seems wrong.