capture.love/README.md

# capture.love

Sometimes you just want to capture a stray thought. Seeing unrelated text can
make it fly right out of your brain. This app gives you a blank slate every
time, and saves what you write somewhere in a single hard-coded directory
tree. Once it's saved, use [pensieve.love](https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/pensieve.love)
to browse that directory tree.

capture.love is a compatible fork of [lines.love](http://akkartik.name/lines.html),
an editor for plain text where you can also seamlessly insert line drawings.
Designed above all to be easy to modify and give you early warning if your
modifications break something.

## Getting started

Install [LÖVE](https://love2d.org). It's just a 5MB download, open-source and
extremely well-behaved. I'll assume below that you can invoke it using the
`love` command, but that might vary depending on your OS.

First run: [run from the terminal](https://love2d.org/wiki/Getting_Started#Running_Games)
with a directory to write notes to.

Later runs: you don't need to provide any arguments. For convenience, turn it
into a .love file you can double-click on:
```
$ zip -r /tmp/capture.love *.lua
```

## Keyboard shortcuts

While editing text:
* `ctrl+f` to find patterns within a file
* `ctrl+c` to copy, `ctrl+x` to cut, `ctrl+v` to paste
* `ctrl+z` to undo, `ctrl+y` to redo
* `ctrl+=` to zoom in, `ctrl+-` to zoom out, `ctrl+0` to reset zoom
* `alt+right`/`alt+left` to jump to the next/previous word, respectively
* mouse drag or `shift` + movement to select text, `ctrl+a` to select all
* `ctrl+e` to modify the sources

For shortcuts while editing drawings, consult the online help. Either:
* hover on a drawing and hit `ctrl+h`, or
* click on a drawing to start a stroke and then press and hold `h` to see your
  options at any point during a stroke.

capture.love has been exclusively tested so far with a US keyboard layout. If
you use a different layout, please let me know if things worked, or if you
found anything amiss: http://akkartik.name/contact

## Known issues

* No support yet for Unicode graphemes spanning multiple codepoints.

* No support yet for right-to-left languages.

* Undo/redo may be sluggish in large files. Large files may grow sluggish in
  other ways. capture.love works well in all circumstances with files under
  50KB.

* If you kill the process, say by force-quitting because things things get
  sluggish, you can lose data.

* The text cursor will always stay on the screen. This can have some strange
  implications:

    * A long series of drawings will get silently skipped when you hit
      page-down, until a line of text can be showed on screen.
    * If there's no line of text at the top of the file, you may not be able
      to scroll back up to the top with page-up.

  So far this app isn't really designed for drawing-heavy files. For now I'm
  targeting mostly-text files with a few drawings mixed in.

* No clipping yet for drawings. In particular, circles/squares/rectangles and
  point labels can overflow a drawing.

* Touchpads can drag the mouse pointer using a light touch or a heavy click.
  On Linux, drags using the light touch get interrupted when a key is pressed.
  You'll have to press down to drag.

* Can't scroll while selecting text with mouse.

* No scrollbars yet. That stuff is hard.

## Mirrors and Forks

This repo is a fork of [lines.love](http://akkartik.name/lines.html), an
editor for plain text where you can also seamlessly insert line drawings.
Updates to it can be downloaded from:

* https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/capture.love
* https://tildegit.org/akkartik/capture.love
* https://git.merveilles.town/akkartik/capture.love
* https://nest.pijul.com/akkartik/capture.love (using the Pijul version control system)

Further forks are encouraged. If you show me your fork, I'll link to it here.

## Associated tools

* https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/pensieve.love is the full-scale UI for browsing
  notes captured using capture.love.
* https://codeberg.org/akkartik/lines2md exports lines.love files to Markdown
  and (non-editable) SVG.
* https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/lines2html.love exports lines.love files to html
  and inline SVG.

## Feedback

[Most appreciated.](http://akkartik.name/contact)