http://akkartik.name/lines.html

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Kartik Agaram

                       Plain text. With lines.

Here's a couple of screenshots from my new text editor:

[cat2] [gravity]

I like plain text. I also like doodling while I write. Some things
are just easier to explain with a picture. But if I need to draw a
picture today, I need to stop writing plain text, pick an app,
dismiss a couple of dialogs or tours of new features in front of my
face, think about all the ways it's acting for its creators rather
than for me, copy my text into it, draw my picture--and then I don't
have plain text anymore. I end up with some bloated format that only
one or two apps can open. Apps that may be well-behaved now, but
tomorrow? Who knows?

What is plain text, anyway? It's a way to interpret a sequence of
bytes that a lot of people had to gradually invent a long time ago,
now baked so deep into our computers that we take it for granted.
It's simpler than pdf, but it's not trivial (oh hi there Unicode).
Too bad the inventors of plain text didn't have a graphical screen or
a mouse. Or is it? What if we pretend we can go back in time, and
create a transparent, gracefully degrading plain-text format that is
trivial to build viewers and editors for?

Presenting lines.love. Initially it's a vanilla text editor.

[1]

You can type some text into it.

[2]

Some more.

[3]

If you look inside the file, you see plain text.

$ cat lines.txt
Hi there.

I am some text.

But what are those little boxes?

[4]

Click on one, and you get a space you can draw in.

[5]

Here's a line.

[6]

And it's still plain text.

$ cat text
Hi there.
```lines
{"p2":{"x":141,"y":85},"mode":"line","p1":{"x":34,"y":44}}
```

I am some text.

Text you type in will always be readable. The drawings take a little
code to display, but not much (see below). If you find yourself in a
situation where you can't display them, well you still have the plain
text. And the warm fuzzies that you have a picture you could look at
under slightly better circumstances.

some details

The raw bytes that currently encode each line are nothing special. We
could and should standardize them across multiple viewers, browsers
and text editors. Teach programming environments to ignore them just
like comments.

My current representation always divides up the page width into 256
parts so that each co-ordinate fits in a single byte. That feels like
enough resolution for simple line drawings. Instead of the above
syntax combining Markdown and JSON, I could use a Unicode private use
area to define bytes that mean "line," "circle" and so on.

the app

I've tried really hard to make this easy to try out, reliable and
above all, safe for you. (I actually spent a few years building my
own computer from scratch so I could have perfect control over
security, but anyways. This way is easier and almost just as good.)

Step 1. Download LOVE (~5MB). Follow the usual process for your OS to
install it. If you need help, just reach out any time, day or night.

(Take a moment here to appreciate the fine folks at LOVE. They've
built a marvel that is open source and easy for programmers to build
and audit. You can now also try out a few thousand other games and
tools on itch.io, most of them also open source and easy to take
apart. I just love how this eco-system rewards curiosity.)

Step 2. Download lines.love (38KB).

Step 3. Double-click on it and start writing. Or drag a (sub-50KB)
file on to the window to edit it. (Make a backup first, though. I've
been using it for a few weeks without issues, but lines.love comes
with no warranties. See the GPLv2 license inside the download--which
is just a zip file--for more details.)

And that's it! For the most part I've tried to make all the
drawing-related features fade into the background when you're not
drawing. It's plain text, it's mostly just for writing. Infinite
undo, autosave, modern features like that.

But when you need a drawing and click on one of those boxes, I want
this to be as quick and easy to draw a few lines with as pen and
paper. No searching for a menu to enter drawing mode, going into a
whole new environment where you can't see what you wrote (I'm looking
at you, Google Docs), and hitting save before you can see the drawing
in your doc.

For example, pen and paper lets me change my mind mid-stroke. Google
docs--with all its nested menu strips and levels on levels of
tools--can't do that. To make drawing as natural as possible, I assume
you have one hand on the mouse or touchpad and the other hand on the
keyboard. If you start out drawing and realize you're drawing a line,
when really you need a circle, just press o without releasing the
mouse. Check out this 10-second video.

(Notice the subtle little hint of the current drawing mode in the top
right of the drawing. See how it switches to a circle after I hit o
on the keyboard.)

Using the keyboard and mouse together like this will feel new at
first. There are a few shortcuts to familiarize yourself with, though
not many. To see a list of shortcuts available when drawing, hover on
a drawing and then press ctrl-h for context-sensitive help. Hit esc
to dismiss help. You can also start a stroke and hold down h to see
your options in the middle of a stroke.

(I require ctrl- chords when not pressing the mouse so that you don't
accidentally modify a drawing when you were typing text, just because
the mouse happened to fall within a drawing as you typed.)

This is getting long, so I'll stop here. Try out lines.love and tell
me what you think. No question or issue is too small.

P.S. If you're interested in poking under the hood, lines.love is
just a .zip file and it contains the full (few hundred lines of)
source code for the app. If you have questions, I have answers!

credits

Lots of ideas gratefully stolen from the Sketchpad project.
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Last updated 2022-06-04