capture.love

Sometimes you just want to capture a stray thought. Seeing unrelated text can make it fly right out of your brain. This app gives you a blank slate every time, and saves what you write somewhere in a single hard-coded directory tree. Once it's saved, use pensieve.love to browse that directory tree.

capture.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. I'll assume below that you can invoke it using the love command, but that might vary depending on your OS.

First run: run from the terminal with a directory to write notes to.

Later runs: you don't need to provide any arguments. For convenience, turn it into a .love file you can double-click on:

$ zip -r /tmp/capture.love *.lua

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
• 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.

capture.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.

• Undo/redo may be sluggish in large files. Large files may grow sluggish in other ways. capture.love works well in all circumstances with files under 50KB.

• If you kill the process, say by force-quitting because things things get sluggish, you can lose data.

• 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.

• 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. Updates to it can be downloaded from:

• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/capture.love
• https://tildegit.org/akkartik/capture.love
• https://git.merveilles.town/akkartik/capture.love
• https://nest.pijul.com/akkartik/capture.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/pensieve.love is the full-scale UI for browsing notes captured using capture.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.

Feedback

Most appreciated.