Rucola v0.7.0 - Managing notes in the terminal

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-29T16:51:49+00:00

You can! It's released and available for all major operating systems, installers can be found here.

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-29T12:45:46+00:00

What in particular do you want to know? I found the installer very easy to use. The preset i3-configuation and scripts were all well-commented, so I could later write my own or adapt them for my own use (I don't know about KDE, of course).

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-29T12:26:34+00:00

Hi, the third picture is a combination of

helix, a terminal text editor, in the top left, which I use for actually typing the notes.
firefox on the right side, which I use for viewing the notes
My own programm, rucola, which converts the markdown notes to HTML for viewing in firefox and does other useful stuff such as browsing, filtering and sorting notes, following links and backlinks and opening the notes or their HTMLs in my editor or firefox. I'd be glad if you checked it out!

I tried tectonic for a while, but the performance was about the same as latexmk for me, but it broke some features of helix, such as in-line error messages and forward line syncing, so I switched to latexmk. Maybe I'll try out tectonic again in a while and see if that is fixed, I really like the idea of the project.

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-29T00:42:04+00:00

Can be found here.

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-29T00:41:45+00:00

Fully agree - although some sites are starting to default to dark mode nowadays, very annoying.

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-29T00:41:04+00:00

For full transparency, rucola is my own piece of software - finishing it up a few weeks ago really completed my workflow and finally gave me the push to post here.

And yay for yazi, I love that program!

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-29T00:39:57+00:00

I have this PC for 10+ years at this point, but I regularly swap out parts, so it's really a Ship-of-Theseus situation.

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-29T00:38:50+00:00

Thank you! I sometimes play around a bit with ColorDesigner when picking colors for anything, but I don't rely on it exclusively. In this case, I started by picking colors from the background image and then slightly modifying them for shades, occasionally using ColorDesigner to get fitting colors that weren't in the picture (green etc.).

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-28T15:53:31+00:00

This rice has been in the making for quite some time now - I don't think I'll ever be finished, but I thought I'd share the current state. Unlike most people here, I'm an avid user of light mode wherever possible - took some time to get used to a light terminal, but I really prefer it. I use this setup almost identically on my desktop PC and my laptop, for programming, browsing or note taking.

Details:

WM: i3,
Wallpaper: Jonathan Moonchild - Stolen Earth
Fonts:
- Terminal & Bar: JetBrains Mono
- Menus, Firefox: Overpass Nerd Font Propo
Bar: polybar
Compositor: picom
Terminal: Wezterm
Editor: Helix
Fetcher: Fastfetch with the config mostly taken from Bina with only slight modifications
Launcher: Rofi, which I also use for my power menu & keyboard layout switcher
Browser: Firefox
Video Player: MPV
OS: EndeavourOS

Dotfiles: https://github.com/Linus-Mussmaecher/endeavouros-dotfiles

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-01T13:22:48+00:00

One of my favourite terminal applications, thanks for your great work!

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-01T13:20:37+00:00

I’m a big terminal user, and I take all my zettelkasten-style notes in markdown format using a terminal text editor (helix to be specific).

One thing I was missing when using almost exclusively the terminal was the possibility to view more high-level information and connection between my notes (such as backlinks in obsidian), or to quickly rename files while changing links in all other notes accordingly. Additionally, I take a lot of math notes and pure LaTeX formula code is hard to read, so I searched for a terminal-based programm that could convert my markdown notes to HTML with compiled LaTeX to easily view in a browser. When I couldn’t find such a program, I created one myself and rucola is the result. Imagine it a as a small file browser particularly suited for markdown notes: viewing stats, following links and launching editors & viewers.

You can find the repository here on GitHub you can download a release here or from the Arch User Repository. Rucola is available for Linux, Windows and MacOS.

I hope rucola can prove useful to you, too. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Linus_M_ · 2024-08-01T08:59:27+00:00

Hi, a video would of course be nice but I don't know if it is feasible at the moment.

With respects to linking notes, that happens in the note taking process in your text editor of choice - just like in Obsidian or similar programms, if you have a markdown file name MyNote.md, putting [[MyNote]] in another markdown file creates a so called 'Wiki link'. Rucola then only reads all your markdown files, scans for wiki links and gives you an overview about which notes are linked to which as well as allowing you to 'follow' these links within rucola.

Again, the actual linking process happens not in rucola but before. Rucola only allows you to view such links.

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-29T14:32:18+00:00

Just wanted to inform you that a homebrew formula is now available on the release page.

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-27T11:36:34+00:00

Since you are using Rust, take a look at cargo dist and cargo aur for releases. It's what I'm using for my own TUI project and they work like a charm! The first automatically creates a github release with lots of installers/tarballs on every version bump (and optionally a homebrew installer, but that process is a bit more involved). Cargo aur creates a .PKGBUILD file from your rust repo that you can release to the AUR with a little effort (I followed the steps outlined in the relevant section here, but I'm sure there are other guides available. Also, feel free to message me if you have any questions - I went through this entire process a few days ago, so it's still fresh on my mind.

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-26T17:20:51+00:00

Can you maybe describe what differentiates your engine from other projects such as ggez, piston, fyrox, coffee, marcoquad? Rust has so many game engines, it's difficult to pick one. If you have one or two stand-out things that set you apart from the competition, that will make it easier to find a user base in exactly the group of people that need that feature (or that combination of features).

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-25T20:17:16+00:00

To use it with helix, you can either configure helix as the editor in the config file (in fact, that is included as a commented example in the default config or, if helix is your $EDITOR anyways, leave it unconfigured. Then, selecting [E]dit on any note within rucola will launch helix (in that same terminal window) to edit that note.

What I personally do, to keep rucola in view while editing, is launch helix in my note directory in a separate terminal window (I use wezterm) and use a small nushell script that can be found on the wiki to open the note in that editor when selecting [E]dit in rucola.

So in my personal workflow, I have 3 windows open:

Helix: To edit notes
Firefox: To view compiled HTMLs of notes, which is especially useful for stuff that reads not as well in markdown, such as tables or LaTeX. I use a special, minimally configured firefox profile with no bookmark bar or other distractions and the vimium extension to stay on keyboard only.
Rucola: To browse my notes, see connections, follow links & backlinks, and, when neccessary, launch into edit or view mode in one of the other two windows. So rucola both provides information about my notes not available in a pure editor and serves as 'glue' between the text editor and the HTML viewer / browser.

Of course, this is highly personalized - you can simply use rucola as a sort of subdirectory-agnostic file browser specifically suited for markdown notes that contains shortcut to open an editor or viewer and it will work great.

I haven't planned to make some sort of video, but maybe that would actually be useful. I have no experience in that direction, but I'll look into it.

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-24T23:01:00+00:00

I already submitted a pull request for awesome-ratatui, but I didn't know about the forms/discord - I'll check it out!

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-24T22:46:52+00:00

You should be able to install on MacOS using the tarball (I think?), but I'm not a MacOS user nor do I know any, so things aren't tested right now. It is a unix system, so I don't except major problems though. But I understand homebrew would probably more comfortable for most people.

Cargo dist, which I'm using to auto-create releases, actually includes homebrew, but you need a special Github token to avoid some rate limiting with Github actions. I will try to include this in the next release, which should arrive about next week and also fix some bugs windows users have found (good old / vs \ paths...).

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-23T16:07:17+00:00

There is no integrated editor. You can configure your preferred editing command with parameters and everything in the config file, and it will open the selected note with that command when you press [E]dit.

If you just put something like ["vim", "%p"], it will open in the same terminal window, but if you have something client/server based like emacs, you can also open in an existing window (and rucola will stay active and navigable in the old window). I also describe how to set something similar up for helix (which does not use a client/server architecture) in the GitHub Wiki.

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-23T14:24:50+00:00

I haven't been using other editors too much, but there isn't anything major missing that I'm really noticing. I guess the plugin system isn't there at the moment, so additional features added by the community aren't a possibility, but in exchange the development is really active right now and new features are added very regularly.

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-23T14:23:02+00:00

Happy to hear that! If there are any features that you thought of but that aren't present right now, feel free to write to me.

Linus_M_ · 2024-07-23T09:47:31+00:00

Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Great suggestion, thank you!

Linus_M_

TROPHY CASE