Plain text with lines

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.

http://akkartik.name/lines.html

Invocation

Like all LÖVE apps, lines.love can be invoked either from a terminal or by clicking on the application in a graphical desktop.

When invoked from a terminal, you can pass the love binary the path to either the zipped lines.love or a directory containing lines.love unzipped.

$ path/to/love path/to/lines.love

$ path/to/love .  # from this repo directory
$ path/to/love path/to/lines/directory  # from anywhere

By default, lines.love reads/writes the file lines.txt in your default user/home directory (https://love2d.org/wiki/love.filesystem.getUserDirectory).

When invoked from a terminal, you can pass in a different file to edit, either to the zipped or unzipped versions:

$ path/to/love path/to/lines.love path/to/file/to/edit

$ path/to/love path/to/lines/directory /path/to/file/to/edit

On a graphical desktop you can also drag and drop a file icon on to the lines.love window.

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

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.

lines.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.

• Undo/redo may be sluggish in large files. Large files may grow sluggish in other ways. lines.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

Updates to lines.love can be downloaded from the following mirrors in addition to the website above:

• https://github.com/akkartik/lines.love
• https://repo.or.cz/lines.love.git
• https://codeberg.org/akkartik/lines.love
• https://tildegit.org/akkartik/lines.love
• https://git.tilde.institute/akkartik/lines.love
• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/lines.love
• https://pagure.io/lines.love

Forks of lines.love are encouraged. If you show me your fork, I'll link to it here.

• https://github.com/akkartik/lines-polygon-experiment -- an experiment that uses separate shortcuts for regular polygons. ctrl+3 for triangles, ctrl+4 for squares, etc.

Feedback

Most appreciated.