c-nexus

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Small code footprint.

Create notes and link them, however you can think of. Once created you can browse the nodes.

It's possible to link a note to one that may or may not get created in the future.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/rphii/c-nexus
cd c-nexus
make

or alternatively without make (you can choose your compiler of choice; gcc, clang, tcc, ...)

git clone https://github.com/rphii/c-nexus
cd c-nexus
gcc src/*.c -o a

In both cases it creates an executable a; adjust it if desired.

Compile Flags

• -DCOLORPRINT_DISABLE disable all colored/bold/italic (formatted) output
• -DPROC_COUNT=<num> number of threads
• -DNODE_SHOW_COUNT_IN_OUT=1 show in and outgoing number of notes, instead of the sum
• -DVECTOR_SORT_DATES_FIRST=1 show dates first, then icons

Clean

• run make clean
• on Cygwin trick it into thinking we're on linux so it can use rm etc. by running OS= make clean
• on Windows I don't know if this cleaning stuff works (or anything in general... if something doesn't quite work on windows, well, I'll fix it maybe, if I know about the issue and feel like fixing it)

Views

These controls (and maybe even more) are also found in the nexus itself, since I keep that more updated than this readme... Gotta use your program, y'know :)

Normal View

• h : go back in history (can be: viewed notes, searches)
• j : down
• k : up
• l : follow the arrow
• q : quit
• Q : rebuild (certainly works on linux)
• [space] : fold/unfold descriptions
• f : enter search view
• t : enter icon view

Search View

• [type something] : search for something, case insensitive
• [enter] : switch from editing search string to selecting found nodes; in this mode ..
  • .. hjkl : behaves as it would in normal view
  • .. f, [enter] : puts you back to editing the search string
  • .. F : clears the editing string and puts you back to editing it
  • .. [escape] : goes back to node you've watched before searching; as if nothing was selected (it goes back in the history)
  • .. t : enter icon view
  • .. q : quit
  • .. Q : rebuild (certainly works on linux)

Icon View

• hjkl : behaves as it would in normal view
• t, [escape] : abort icon view and go back
• f : enter search view
• q : quit
• Q : rebuild (certainly works on linux)

Command Line Arguments

• Print version and exit : --version
• Change default view : --view
• Change entry note : --entry
• Print help (about these and more arguments) and exit : --help

How to add notes?

Edit the source file.

There's a handy macro called NEXUS_INSERT. See the example(s) provided.

Upsides?

• at startup, all notes are stored in RAM (fast lookup)
• compile checked code/notes! isn't that cool?
• you can just disable the notes you don't want to be seen via. code!
• advanced formatting is quite easily doable; bold, italicize, underline and even colorize your texts!
• every note can have a icon + description (unlike in a file/folder structure, where folders typically don't)

Downsides?

• at startup, all notes are stored in RAM (amount limited through RAM)
• no editing of notes while browsing them (at least not yet)
• terminal interface doesn't yet handle the displaying of very long notes

Tradeoffs

One could argue that this approach is bad; well, it certainly isn't bad - I could've used (and probably will in the future) a file/folder structure with HTML/Markdown files and just parse them instead. Since that also costs time to do, I for the time being, focus on just getting the app working. Once that's all done and good and the project is at a point where I'm satisfied with all the other, more important tasks that are screaming to get fixed, I'll probably look into that a bit more.

During development of this project I came across several tradeoffs that I'm quite willingly going to accept, for better or worse - but mainly for simplicity's sake in note organization.

• only one note with the same title is possible - and that is case insensitive at that
• each note can "only" have one command attached
• each note can only have one icon

Notes on Searching

• if you have many notes, you might benefit from parallelized searching. you can activate it via specifing the number of threads with the preprocessor token PROC_COUNT (e.g. if you want to search with 8 threads, in the Makefile add -DPROC_COUNT=8 to the CFLAGS)
• if multithreaded searching is enabled, I at the moment do not bother to sort the found results, so that's that (equal searches of something might spit them out in randomized order)
• even if you're not searching with multithreading, the results can seem unordered, because we're searching through the items in a hash table, after all. and I do not bother to sort them as well
• Q: why not sort the results?
  • A: 1) I don't know what to sort for, except maybe how likely a string is present...
  • A: 2) ...which I don't quite know how to do. I'd have to rework the searching algorithm...
  • A: 3) ...so when it bothers me too much, I'll rework it, eventually, maybe