Clown is an outliner with notes. It is written in Clojure and ClojureScript.
This is pre-alpha software -- very early in development. Most features not implemented.
Clown lets you build an outline and attach any number of long-form notes to any headline. Editing of outlines and notes is done on the same page making it easier to work on both at the same time. I like to keep the "big picture" in mind, as embodied by the outline, even when editing small details in a note.
The intent is to build this into a personal knowledge management system.
The program is surprisingly useful even in this primitive state. By default, when the program is opened, it will look for and load a file named World_Domination_Plan.edn, included in the repository.
Here's a screenshot showing what it looks like at the moment.
You can make changes to the plan or open any other .edn file of the proper format by clicking the Open button. You can start a new outline using the New button. (Sorry, no keyboard shortcut yet.) You can save at any time by typing Cmd-S or clicking the Save button.
The outliner is pretty standard. Just type stuff in. Headlines work like most other text entry areas. Any headline can be as long as you want it to be.
The Backspace and Delete characters work pretty much as expected. They will also cross headline boundaries. For example, you could put the cursor on the last character in an outliner and erase the entire outline by continuing to press Backspace.
Headings with subheadings will display a chevron character (▼ or ►) in the left gutter. Headlines without children display a bullet (●). When a right-pointing chevron (►) is displayed, the heading has children that are hidden. They can be displayed by clicking the chevron or typing Cmd-0. An expanded headline can be collapsed, hiding its children, by clicking the the down-pointing chevron (▼) or typing Cmd-9.
To create a new headline below the current one, hit Return. To insert a new headline above the current one, press Shft-Return.
To indent/undent (demote/promote) a headline use the Tab and Shft-Tab keys respectively.
You can move headlines up or down by pressing Alt-Cmd-↑ or Alt-Cmd-↓, respectively
There are more keyboard commands. If you are interested, check the source. They are likely to change in the future though.
When you click on a headline in the outline view to edit it, you can enter raw Markdown. When you click anywhere else, the Markdown will be converted to HTML and the formatting you used will be shown. This switching back and forth between editing and display is kind of like the way the Roam editor works.
It is still early days for this feature and it can get a little flaky at times. It is intended that this flakiness will be removed and syntax highlighting and math formatting will be added. It is also intended to expand this feature to the Notes pane as well.
We'll see how this feature works in practice before finalizing it.
Any heading can have an arbitrary number of notes associated with it. (There is a practical limit at the moment. Only one note is displayed at a time. I have not yet devised a clever way to selecte among a very large number of notes to select the one to display.) Each note must have a unique (to the outline heading) title.
Any headline that has associated notes will display a small "note" icon in the left border. Clicking the headline (not the note icon) will display a tabbed page with the titles of all of those notes. Clicking a title will bring that note forward for display.
The note display is just a regular text area at the moment. You can add as much text as you want.
To add a note, click the button with the plus sign above the note display area. To delete a note, click the x displayed next to the note title.
When a view of the program is active, pressing Ctrl-Shft-P will bring up a dialog letting you set some options concerning the way the program operates.
Both of these sections will always extend vertically to use all of the space available to them.
The width of the two sections can be changed independently. Hover over the vertical rule on the right side of the section you want to widen or narrow.
As you hover over the rule, it will "fatten" up, giving you a bigger target. Just drag the mouse right or left to the new size you want. The new width will be saved and restored the next time you load the program.
- The outliner supports an arbitrary number of headlines nested to an arbitrary depth.
- Each headline can have an arbitrary number of notes attached. There is a practical limit to the number of notes dictated by how many titles can be displayed. Scrolling through the note tabs is not supported yet.
- There is only simple text formatting available in the outline, not in the notes area.
- The keybindings are horrible. Trying to get a set of keybindings that work the same across browsers without screwing something else up is hard.
For building development and "production" versions of clown, you will need Java and Clojure. I have been doing my work with Java 11 and Clojure 1.10.3.
I've been testing on Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Brave browsers.
To get an interactive development environment run:
clj -M:fig:repl
This will compile a development build, open a tab in the default browser at localhost:1597, and start a ClojureScript REPL in the terminal. Changes made to the ClojureScript portion of the project will be compiled and reloaded in real time. Changes affecting the browser display (Reagent components) will show up in the browser as well.
clj -M:fig:dev
Similar to the above but does not open a REPL.
To build an uberjar for production run:
clj -M:fig:prod
To run the uberjar, you need Java. Clojure is not required just to run the program.
You can run the resulting jar from the project directory by entering:
java -jar target/clown.jar
Launching the uberjar will also open a tab in your default browser.
(The prod.clj script, which builds the uberjar, has a setting to generate an uberjar with a name that is easier to type. The setting is marked in the source if you want to change it back to the more traditional clown-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar.)
Testing scripts are provided for both Clojure and ClojureScript unit testing.
After starting a development session, figwheel.main does automatic testing as well. Navigate your browser to http://localhost:9500/figwheel-extra-main/autotesting to see the test results.
To do one-time ClojureScript testing, run:
clj -M:fig:test-cljs
Test results will show up in the terminal. A testing web page will be opened, but you can just close it after the tests have completed.
To run Clojure unit tests just run:
clj -M:test-clj
The results will appear in the terminal.
To delete all compilation artifacts, use:
clj -M:clean
To check for outdated dependencies, run:
clj -M:ancient
Probably plenty at this point. If you find one that you need to have fixed, file an issue. I'll see what I can do, but no promises.
- As mentioned above, keyboard shortcuts are a mess.
- The undo/redo architecture is really wrong for this architecture.
- More complete usage documentation.
- Printing? How would you even do it?
- Checkboxes?
- LaTeX
- Syntax highlighting
- Stats: # Headlines, words, characters
- Use Drag 'n Drop for
- Opening files from the desktop
- Reorganizing headlines in the outliner
- Reorganizing notes in the note taker
- Change order of notes associated with a particular headline
- Move notes between headlines
- Search
- Entire document
- Outline only
- Notes only
- Outline branch
- All notes associated with a headline
- Import/export OPML?
- Version control?
- Version comparison?
- Expandable stats under title and file name
- Include zettel IDs?
If you actually get it running and see something that you believe should be changed, open an issue.
I'm not accepting Pull Requests yet.
Copyright © 2020 - 2021 David D. Clark
Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.