A slate to write and draw on, 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.

Screenshot:

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

Feel free to quit any time. The scratch space is preserved across restarts.

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.

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

Html files are saved in the directory containing this app.

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 Only left alt is supported, because many keyboard layouts use right alt like shift for typing characters, and I don’t know how to figure out the current layout.
• 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 some (anecdotally Android) mobile devices.

• 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.

• 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:

• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/etch.love
• https://tildegit.org/akkartik/etch.love
• https://git.merveilles.town/akkartik/etch.love
• https://nest.pijul.com/akkartik/etch.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. Messages, PRs, patches, forks, it’s all good.