# capture.love
[](https://0dependencies.dev)
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.
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.
* 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.
* If you ever see a crash when clicking on the mouse, it might be because a
mouse press and release need to happen in separate frames. Try pressing and
releasing more slowly and let me know if that helps or not. This is klunky,
sorry.
* 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.
* https://codeberg.org/eril/lines2html.love provides the option to export
just the drawings to a directory. Also provides a CLI, which should be more
natural for many people.
## Feedback
[Most appreciated.](http://akkartik.name/contact) Messages, PRs, patches,
forks, it's all good.