Plain text with lines

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.

http://akkartik.name/lines.html

Screenshot:

This in-progress fork tries to fix some issues on mobile devices with touch screens and more restrictive storage models:

• Switching files using a button and dialog rather than drag-n-drop.
  • Spurious filedropped events have been observed on LÖVE Android.
• No resizing or moving windows since it's not clear that that's ever supported on mobile devices. Assume all windows are always maximized.
• Some tweaks to automated tests to pass on my Android devices, with zero confidence of any sort of coverage.
• ... (there will likely be others)

Getting started

Install LÖVE. 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.

To run from the terminal, pass this directory to LÖVE, optionally with a file path to edit.

Alternatively, turn it into a .love file you can double-click on:

$ zip -r /tmp/lines.love *.lua

By default, lines.love reads/writes the file lines.txt in a directory relative to this app.

To open a different file, hit ctrl+w and type in the new filename. You won't have access to most other directories.

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.

lines.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

• Drawing doesn't work yet on mobile devices.

• 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. lines.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.

• Can't scroll while selecting text with mouse.

Mirrors and Forks

This repo is a fork of lines.love, 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/lines-mobile.love
• https://nest.pijul.com/akkartik/lines-mobile.love (using the Pijul version control system)

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

Feedback

Most appreciated.