techmeet.love/README.md

184 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown

In progress. Beginnings of a possible shared wiki and discussion system for
[Lion Kimbro's Internet Office Hours](https://communitywiki.org/wiki/LionKimbro)
community.
Techmeet.love started out as [a private single-person note-taking
system](https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/pensieve.love). It is now a space for the
long-form asynchronous communications of a small community, and a place to
experiment with and evolve new ideas for such collaborative communications.
Some features:
- Multiple views into an independent repo of plain text notes (with [some line
drawings](http://akkartik.name/lines.html)).
- Notes can have arbitrary named relationships (links) to each other,
resulting in a graph.
- The primary visual metaphor is an infinite 2D surface of fixed-width,
non-overlapping, notes that can be operated on with an extensible set of
commands.
- Commands usually (but not always) create new columns of notes. Each column
is an independent visualization of a subset of notes.
- Find on surface.
- Search all notes on disk in reverse-chronological order.
- Notes can contain hyperlinks in [[wikiwords]] to other notes. Hyperlinks
can't contain spaces. Clicking on a hyperlink opens the target in a new
column.
- A few other things. Explore the command menu and palette along the top.
Some videos to help visualize these bullets (albeit with outdated UI):
* https://archive.org/details/akkartik-pensieve-2022-07-27 (4.5 minutes)
* https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108766067153506592 (30 seconds)
* https://archive.org/details/akkartik-pensieve-2022-08-29 (3 minutes)
## 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.
There's currently a few moving parts to set up:
0. Clone this repo.
```
git clone https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/techmeet.love techmeet
```
1. Decide where to store data for the app. Say it's `$DATADIR`.
2. Clone the techmeet-data repo into `$DATADIR`.
```
git clone https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/techmeet-data $DATADIR
```
Replace `$DATADIR` for yourself.
3. Initialize an example layout for the 2D surface. On a POSIX system, the
commands would be:
```
cd $DATADIR
cp config.example config
```
Again, adjust `$DATADIR` for yourself.
This is an optional step. The surface layout feels like something private
to each individual and doesn't really belong in this repo. This is just a
convenience to get you started.
4. Run the app while specifying `$DATADIR`:
```
love techmeet $DATADIR
```
You'll only need to do this the first time. After that, running without
args will remember `$DATADIR`.
Your OS will likely have ways to run this command based on a global
shortcut, should you so desire.
Start exploring! Key shortcuts:
* `ctrl+enter` will open up the command palette and give you more of a
sense of your options
* `ctrl+e` makes the highlighted note editable. When you're done just hit
`ctrl+e` again to freeze its contents against accidental editing. At
most one note can be editable at any moment.
* When a note is editable, empty lines will show a little box icon on the
left margin. Click it to create a line drawing. Line drawings can only
live in their own lines separate from text.
* `ctrl+h` when hovering over a drawing will show you the options
available to you. Most operations involve holding down the mouse and
making a stroke. You can also start a stroke and press and hold `h`
without releasing to see options available to you mid-stroke.
## 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+w` 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.
techmeet.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.
* Editing a note larger than 50KB grows sluggish (particularly during
undo/redo) even when maximized.
* If you kill the process, say by force-quitting because things things get
sluggish, you can lose data.
* Searching is slow. There's no index yet. Searching happens in the same
thread as UI updates, so UI may go unresponsive with really large notes. I
haven't observed this in practice.
* Pressing keys while editing will try to always keep the text cursor on
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.
Its immediate upstream is [pensieve.love](https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/pensieve.love),
a private note-taking app for a single individual. Updates to it can be
downloaded from:
* https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/techmeet.love
* https://tildegit.org/akkartik/techmeet.love
* https://git.merveilles.town/akkartik/techmeet.love
* https://nest.pijul.com/akkartik/techmeet.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/techmeet-capture.love provides a blank-slate UI
into the same notes directory as techmeet.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)
In particular, techmeet.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.