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.
• 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Some videos to help visualize these bullets (albeit with outdated UI):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. It’s just a 5MB download, open-source and extremely well-behaved.

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
   

Alternatively, run the app from the desktop and drop the icon for $DATADIR on to its window.

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.

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
• F4 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.

• 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.

• 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, 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
• 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.
• 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. Messages, PRs, patches, forks, it’s all good.

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.