etch.love/README.md

A scratch space to write and draw line drawings, then export to html

Write or draw as much as you like, but only to a single scratch space. Designed for a tablet device, but usable anywhere.

When you're done, export to html and clear the slate.

etch.love is a compatible fork of lines.love, 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. 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.

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

$ zip -r /tmp/lines.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.

etch.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.

• 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.

• Long wrapping lines can't yet distinguish between the cursor at end of one screen line and start of the next, so clicking the mouse to position the cursor can very occasionally do the wrong thing.

• 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. Its immediate upstream is lines-mobile.love, a version for Android and iOS devices. Updates to it can be downloaded from:

• git@git.sr.ht:~akkartik/etch.love

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

Feedback

Most appreciated.