In its early stages in its lifetime, Groen has a potential to be a powerful note taking, organization and todo app thanks to Norg file format. To achive its potential it is better to share thoughts and roadmap for future contributions.
See also: Neorg Mobile Application Roadmap
Self-exlplanatory. As a key feature of Flutter, iOS and Android are both supported. And they should feel as native as possible. It can be achived in the Flutter code base. The user experience of mobile platforms prioritized over desktop platforms. Desktop platforms will be supported but it will be secondary. Web support is not planned for now. May be just a web Norg editor for demo purposes.
As expected, the source of truth is the Norg files on the local filesystem. All the workspace context should be created according to them. So, there should be listeners to filesystem that invalidates caches and indexes in case of any external change to any workspace file. Additionally conflicting changes must be handled without any data loss.
Having to switch to different editor while capturing your thoughts leads to bad user experience. The app can display and edit any text file.
Images may carry more information than text. Norg format has file link feature that allows us to link any file in the workspace. There is no separate link type for images yet. But they can be linked with generic file link for now.
You most likely to have some Neovim experience. You are capable to edit your Norg files easily with your editor and you are waiting for this app to resolve your needs. But mobile apps are open to anyone, not just terminal nerds like us. So, any user can install the app and taking notes even without have to know the Norg file format using the UI/UX features. Which means the app will support both WYSIWYG and WYSINWYG style editing. They will gradually become power users when they want comfortably. Trust the magic of Norg.
Displaying a plain text file format in a mobile application brings a challenge of the altering the files in realtime without changing too much. The app have to be capable of editing as either WYSIWYG and WYSINWYG. When the what you see is not what you get editing active, the changes in the UI content have to be interpreted to the Norg format. This interpretation should not format whole file. Because of in the Norg format whitespaces are not that important, every Neorg user can have different styling choices. The changes in UI have to change the Norg file in a scope that as small as possible.
Note collections can contain massive number of files. It may be impossible to search, link autocomplete and refactor fast. There have to be indexes. Neovim can make use of SQLite database using SQLite plugin. So, the database choice is SQLite to allow future integrations with Neovim and Neorg. SQLite has full text search capabilities with FTS5 extension. Indexing provides us fast linking, backlinking, tagging, searching and refactoring capabilities.
Recalling the thoughts is crucial. With a workspace that have hundreds of notes, file-explorer or tree like UI elements get less effective while navigating between notes. Searching fast and easy is the key of navigation at some point. With the help of the indexes and caches, notes can be searched by their content, tags, ids (zettel), workspace and filename. The list of searchable elements may grow in future. Search input accepts a simple query to get what to search but it is not necessary. If the input has not special query key, results will still include tags etc. They will just be displayed in default order/priority.
Dart can run external executables with FFI. This feature can be used for a plugin system that accepts any programming language that supports FFI (Rust, Go, C, Python). Some features like calendar and TODO may provided as a New parsers for different file formats may provided as offically supported plugins that can be disabled. In that way attraction to the features can be tracked without compromising any individual privacy. The FFI system may not appropriate for security concerns. This topic needs a proper discussion, research and POC.
semver versioning will be used.
Initial release aims to display and edit Norg files in a local workspace, simple usages of links, some UI functionality for non-code usage.
- Implement a level 1 parser in pure Dart
- Display the parsed content in a mock editor
- Implement a simple edit-parse-display loop
- Implement a level 2 parser
- Externalize the Norg parser as a flutter/dart library
- Implement toggle-able autosave
- Choose an appropriate editor library
- Implement directing
{:link:}link format without db or cache - Implement a level 3 parser
- Implement a proper design