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Kartik Agaram

Current state of my note-taking app

Things of note:
* Operates on a hard-coded directory of text files.
* No overlapping, no tiling, just an infinite 2D surface of columns. Commands open new columns.
* Wordstar-style menu up top of important commands in current context, and their shortcuts.
* Command palette at top left that filters commands available in current context.
* Files/nodes can have links. Links can form graphs, as the picture shows (original: maplefish.com/todd/papers/Expe)

(cont'd)

4 Aug 2022 at 18:41 | Open on merveilles.town
13 comments
Kartik Agaram

* Links have labels (next/previous by default).
* Graph-traversal commands can take an argument (next/previous by default) of the edge label you want to follow.
* 'add' adds an edge immediately to the current node, 'append' traverses the edge repeatedly to the end, then adds.
* 'step' navigates along an edge from the current node and opens it in a new column, 'unroll' traverses the edge repeatedly to the end and collects all nodes into a single column.

add:append :: step:unroll

* Links have labels (next/previous by default).
* Graph-traversal commands can take an argument (next/previous by default) of the edge label you want to follow.
* 'add' adds an edge immediately to the current node, 'append' traverses the edge repeatedly to the end, then adds.
* 'step' navigates along an edge from the current node and opens it in a new column, 'unroll' traverses the edge repeatedly to the end and collects all nodes into a single column.

4 Aug 2022 at 18:42 | Open on merveilles.town
sejo
s-ol

@akkartik
the single/recursive command thing is really intriguing right off the bat.

Did you already find some interesting edge-labelling patterns that lends itself to? I guess the obvious one it's designed for is using "next" only between siblings in a hierarchical document so you can [unroll] them, but is there others?

5 Aug 2022 at 22:24 | Open on merveilles.town
Kartik Agaram

@s_ol I don't have much of a vision yet, I've been mostly trying to port over my terminal based workflows until I can do everything within this app.

One thing I often do is go back to an old note and add a digression in the middle of it. For the past few years this has gotten more common but I've had nothing better than to just put some brackets and start writing within them. As a result I never have a second level of digression. Maybe I will with a better tool/representation?

6 Aug 2022 at 0:15 | Open on merveilles.town
Kartik Agaram

@s_ol Now that I think about it, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3 has also been on my mind.

Lots of apps these days use a graph to visualize a network of nodes. But it's just eye candy. I wonder if there's a way to make graph visualizations more useful. Allow a spectrum been seeing a single thing and seeing all the things. Lots of perspectives may help the brain make sense of the graph.

6 Aug 2022 at 0:23 | Open on merveilles.town
Kartik Agaram

@s_ol I want to make it easy to put any two notes on the screen next to each other. Without having to manage file names. I use file names a lot on the terminal.

I also want to try to build an app that feels very stable, moves very little, while dealing with an artifact that can't actually fit on a screen. This is a Christopher Alexander influence: rainmagazine.com/archive/2014/; gregbryant.com/grogbrat/aspen9

6 Aug 2022 at 0:27 | Open on merveilles.town
s-ol

@akkartik
Nice. Colin is on mastodon too btw: @ColinTheMathmo

I've tried building a more comfortable UI along the lines of the system from the HN post above, but the last point you brought up is the hard one here - I couldn't find any tools for *incremental* graph layout so that the graph can stay locally stable as new notes are added and I don't have the graph theory chops to implement something like that myself.

6 Aug 2022 at 12:24 | Open on merveilles.town
Vertigo #$FF

@akkartik It reminds me of TiddlyWiki, except it's in two dimensions. I kind of like it, actually. Would you object to me borrowing and playing with the concept in a future editing environment I'd like to write someday? (Yeah, a very open-ended, long-term project that is poorly defined at the moment, but...)

4 Aug 2022 at 18:45 | Open on hackers.town
Kartik Agaram

@vertigo Oh absolutely, steal away.

For reference, I stole a lot of the ideas for the command palette from youtube.com/watch?v=A0TafHXszg by Philippa Markovics and others at Nextjournal.

4 Aug 2022 at 18:47 | Open on merveilles.town
Colin the Mathmo
Chartodon

@ColinTheMathmo

Your chart is ready, and can be found here:

solipsys.co.uk/Chartodon/10877

Things may have changed since I started compiling that, and some things may have been inaccessible.

In particular, the very nature of the fediverse means some toots may never have made it to my instance, in which case I can't see them, and can't include them.

The chart will eventually be deleted, so if you'd like to keep it, make sure you download a copy.

6 Aug 2022 at 12:43 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
chötrin.

@akkartik oooooo, this is *awesome*. Wouter van Oortmerssen put together something vaguely similar called TreeSheets that I've played with in the past.

strlen.com/treesheets/

Maybe some cross-pollination inspiration there! I wound up using vimwiki because it fits my brain better, but that's neither here nor there!

6 Aug 2022 at 16:42 | Open on tilde.zone
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