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Proof of Concept Terminal Note Browsing Application

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c-nexus

normal search icon
normal search icon

Small code footprint.

Create notes and link them, however you can think of. Once created you can browse the nodes.

It's possible to link a note to one that may or may not get created in the future.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/rphii/c-nexus
cd c-nexus
make

or alternatively without make (you can choose your compiler of choice; gcc, clang, tcc, ...)

git clone https://github.com/rphii/c-nexus
cd c-nexus
gcc src/*.c -o a

In both cases it creates an executable a; adjust it if desired.

Compile Flags

  • -DCOLORPRINT_DISABLE disable all colored/bold/italic (formatted) output
  • -DPROC_COUNT=<num> number of threads
  • -DNODE_SHOW_COUNT_IN_OUT=1 show in and outgoing number of notes, instead of the sum
  • -DVECTOR_SORT_DATES_FIRST=1 show dates first, then icons

Clean

  • run make clean
  • on Cygwin trick it into thinking we're on linux so it can use rm etc. by running OS= make clean
  • on Windows I don't know if this cleaning stuff works (or anything in general... if something doesn't quite work on windows, well, I'll fix it maybe, if I know about the issue and feel like fixing it)

Views

These controls (and maybe even more) are also found in the nexus itself, since I keep that more updated than this readme... Gotta use your program, y'know :)

Normal View

  • h : go back in history (can be: viewed notes, searches)
  • j : down
  • k : up
  • l : follow the arrow
  • q : quit
  • Q : rebuild (certainly works on linux)
  • [space] : fold/unfold descriptions
  • f : enter search view
  • t : enter icon view

Search View

  • [type something] : search for something, case insensitive
  • [enter] : switch from editing search string to selecting found nodes; in this mode ..
    • .. hjkl : behaves as it would in normal view
    • .. f, [enter] : puts you back to editing the search string
    • .. F : clears the editing string and puts you back to editing it
    • .. [escape] : goes back to node you've watched before searching; as if nothing was selected (it goes back in the history)
    • .. t : enter icon view
    • .. q : quit
    • .. Q : rebuild (certainly works on linux)

Icon View

  • hjkl : behaves as it would in normal view
  • t, [escape] : abort icon view and go back
  • f : enter search view
  • q : quit
  • Q : rebuild (certainly works on linux)

Command Line Arguments

  • Print version and exit : --version
  • Change default view : --view
  • Change entry note : --entry
  • Print help (about these and more arguments) and exit : --help

How to add notes?

Edit the source file.

There's a handy macro called NEXUS_INSERT. See the example(s) provided.

Upsides?

  • at startup, all notes are stored in RAM (fast lookup)
  • compile checked code/notes! isn't that cool?
  • you can just disable the notes you don't want to be seen via. code!
  • advanced formatting is quite easily doable; bold, italicize, underline and even colorize your texts!
  • every note can have a icon description (unlike in a file/folder structure, where folders typically don't)

Downsides?

  • at startup, all notes are stored in RAM (amount limited through RAM)
  • no editing of notes while browsing them (at least not yet)
  • terminal interface doesn't yet handle the displaying of very long notes

Tradeoffs

One could argue that this approach is bad; well, it certainly isn't bad - I could've used (and probably will in the future) a file/folder structure with HTML/Markdown files and just parse them instead. Since that also costs time to do, I for the time being, focus on just getting the app working. Once that's all done and good and the project is at a point where I'm satisfied with all the other, more important tasks that are screaming to get fixed, I'll probably look into that a bit more.

During development of this project I came across several tradeoffs that I'm quite willingly going to accept, for better or worse - but mainly for simplicity's sake in note organization.

  • only one note with the same title is possible - and that is case insensitive at that
  • each note can "only" have one command attached
  • each note can only have one icon

Notes on Searching

  • if you have many notes, you might benefit from parallelized searching. you can activate it via specifing the number of threads with the preprocessor token PROC_COUNT (e.g. if you want to search with 8 threads, in the Makefile add -DPROC_COUNT=8 to the CFLAGS)
  • if multithreaded searching is enabled, I at the moment do not bother to sort the found results, so that's that (equal searches of something might spit them out in randomized order)
  • even if you're not searching with multithreading, the results can seem unordered, because we're searching through the items in a hash table, after all. and I do not bother to sort them as well
  • Q: why not sort the results?
    • A: 1) I don't know what to sort for, except maybe how likely a string is present...
    • A: 2) ...which I don't quite know how to do. I'd have to rework the searching algorithm...
    • A: 3) ...so when it bothers me too much, I'll rework it, eventually, maybe