~akkartik/techmeet.love

In progress. Beginnings of a possible shared wiki and discussion system for Lion Kimbro's Internet Office Hours community.

Techmeet.love started out as a private single-person note-taking system. 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).
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.
App sources can be seamlessly edited from within the app (though packaging up modifications to share with others currently has some seams; see below)
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Some videos to help visualize these bullets (albeit with outdated UI):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)

#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.

There's currently a few moving parts to set up:

Clone this repo.

git clone https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/techmeet.love techmeet

Determine where to store data for the app. This location is OS-dependent and constrained by LÖVE's restrictions on apps for privacy reasons. Run the following command from a terminal and immediately close the resulting window:
```
love techmeet
```
On my computer I see this message in the terminal window:
```
reading notes from /home/akkartik/.local/share/love/techmeet/data/
put any notes there (and make frequent backups)
```
Install the shared repo of notes in the directory mentioned above. For me that command is:
```
git clone https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/techmeet-data /home/akkartik/.local/share/love/techmeet/data/
```
Adjust the final path for yourself.
Initialize an example layout for the 2D surface. On a POSIX system, the commands would be:
```
cd /home/akkartik/.local/share/love/techmeet/data/
cp config.example ../config
```
Again, adjust the path on the first line 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.
Run the app again:
```
love techmeet
```
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.

#Modifying the app

Hit ctrl+w from within the app to modify its code. I've only used it to edit simpler forks so far, but would love to collaborate on improving it.

#Known issues

No support yet for Unicode graphemes spanning multiple codepoints.
No support yet for right-to-left languages.
Editing a note grows sluggish if it grows larger than 1.5KB or so. Either use smaller notes (I haven't seen any slowdowns with lots of notes on the surface) or maximize large notes when editing them.
Clicking on a note while editing it sometimes moves the cursor off screen above the viewport, disabling further edits. Workarounds:
- Press ctrl+e twice to leave and reenter edit mode on the same note. This will reposition the cursor within the viewport.
- Pan the surface with the mouse to bring the top of the note is in view.
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.
Hyperlinks have some limitations. They can't contain spaces, and they aren't currently clickable if they wrap across lines.

#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 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

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.

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.