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Carbon Notes

Note taking system and curator.

Background

I've been keeping track of my notes using markdown files synced with Dropbox. This provides a lot of benefits, such as

  • Plain text note storage
  • Local editing in any editor (Vim)
  • Completely control over notes structure
  • Syncing between multiple devices including mobile

Recently though, there have been a number of other features that I would like as well, see the [Minimal Features] section below. Most of these features come stock standard with off the shelf notes managers, such as Notion, Dropbox Paper, and Boostnote. But these notes managers also sacrifice some of the core features I've come to rely on.

Goals

Implement the minimal features listed below while maintaining the current features and requiring little maintenance effort.

Non-Goals

  • Building yet another note management system that tries to solve all problems for all the people
  • Storing notes on my own hosted server that supports syncing
  • Implementing a web based notes editor

Functionality

Minimal Features

  • Nicely rendered notes viewable in web browser (Firefox)
    • Preferable with github readme styling
    • Entirely static (no-server)
  • Linking between source files
    • Need to be able to check for broken links
    • Show a list of places that are linked to a file, in case the user wants to change the path
    • Alternatively have a path-independent linking system (UUID + scan)
  • Checking for broken links
  • Syntax highlighting of code blocks
  • Handles images and other external content
    • Including non-markdown notes
  • Automatically generated index pages per directory

Extra Features

  • Rendering of math formula
  • Markdown note linting
  • Watch mode
    • Re-render files on change
    • Reload the browser as well (Stretch feature which may not be possible with static HTML)
  • Incremental building
  • Note inclusion
    • Inserting notes into other notes
    • Not sure how useful this would be, or how to make it work nicely such that it is obvious a note won't be rendered as standalone but as part of another note.

Longer Term Features

  • Supporting multiple markup source formats
    • Org Mode, Restructured Text, Creole (Wikitext Markup)

Design

Keep in mind 12 Factor CLI Tools when designing the carbon command structure.

Let's start with the directory structure. I plan to use this with Dropbox to facilitate syncing between devices, but this should work for any generic UNIX based file system.

$ tree notes-dir
notes-dir
├── _rendered
├── _static
├── note1.md
├── note2.md
├── subdir1
│   ├── _static
│   └── note3.md
└── subdir2
    ├── note4.md
    ├── note5.pdf
    └── note6.png

We'll go over the _rendered/ directory a bit further down since it is generated by the carbon tool.

The _static/ directories hold any static links that are used in our notes. For the most part this will be images, but could be videos, gifs, or anything that can be linked to in a markdown page.

The rest of the directory shows a typical notes structure. It's worth noting that we have a mix of markdown notes with other file formats, such as PDF and PNG. We want carbon to include these notes in our rendered view so that we can be certain we aren't missing information, or jumping between viewing methods when consuming our notes.

Rendered Directory

The _rendered/ directory is generated by carbon. It has a file structure nearly identical to the notes-dir/ whereby all markdown notes are converted to styled HTML, and index pages are created to help navigate through the directory.

$ tree notes-dir/_rendered/
_rendered
├── note1.html
├── note2.html
├── subdir1
│   ├── index.html
│   └── note3.html
└── subdir2
    ├── index.html
    └── note4.html

Notice that the markdown notes have the same name, but are now suffixed with html rather than md.

The PDF and PNG notes also haven't been copied over. This is because these files may be sufficiently large that we don't want to copy them or there could be many other files of that type, such as if we were storing a photo album. This behaviour can be changed to copy the files, and use links in the _rendered/ directory with a flag or config value.

To ensure that we can still view these files when rendered, they will be linked to in the respective index.html page which will contain an absolute path for the note. And similarly, links in the markdown notes to these notes will be replaced by absolute paths.

This does mean that moving these non-markdown files will result in broken links if they are used in markdown notes. To help fix this, carbon will display a list of the location of broken links (both inline and reference type) when rendering or run with

$ cd notes-dir && carbon check-links
note1.md:17 blah blah blah [broken-link](./this-link-is-broken) blah blah
subdir1/note3.md:42 [broken-link]: ./this-link-is-broken

All paths used in index.html files will be absolute links. Additionally, all links with local paths used in markdown notes will also be converted to absolute paths.

Index Pages

Index pages will be generated for each directory in notes-dir/ excluding _rendered/ and _static/. These will contain links to each note within the directory, and links to index pages of subdirectories as well. Additionally, there will be a link to go up a directory.

Having generated HTML as index pages allows us to embed JS and other extra features, such as jumping to a specific path, into the page.

Rendering

  • Markdown to HTML with the pulldown-cmark crate
  • Syntax highlighting with the syntect crate
    • Theme can be configured in the config or with a flag
  • Math formula rendering with MathJax JS embedded into rendered notes
  • Styling will be with a CSS stylesheet linked from each rendered markdown note
    • Styling can be configured in the config or with a flag
  • Can be highly parallelized.

See the concept/ directory for a proof of concept for combining these to render HTML notes from markdown.

Linting

Linting can be achieved with the markdownlint tool.

We may decide to include a subcommand in carbon to interface with this tool.

Watch Mode

Watch mode can be achieved with the entr tool (or similar).

Depending on how fast rendering will run for a large set of notes, and how easy it will be at that point to implement incremental rendering, we may include a watch command in the future.

Concatenation

It might be useful to be able to include a note within another note so that when editing they are separate, but when rendered they are a single standalone file.

This is something that should be fairly trivial to implement but does require a few careful considerations.

  • Handling cyclical inclusions.
    • E.g: A includes B; B includes C; C includes A.
  • Making it very clear and explicit that a note is included within another note and so it won't be rendered as a standalone file.
    • Or not and leaving it up to the user to remember that noted can be included and so if they can't find a specific note being rendered as a standalone file, then that could be the reason.
    • We could render both the standalone notes, and the aggregate note that includes a bunch of notes, but I think this would lead to more confusion than if we didn't do this.

Incremental Rendering

This will require more thought when we get up to it, but for now these are some initial notes.

  • Would be good to know what changed
    • File content updated vs directory tree changed (e.g: moved file)
  • May need to check links to ensure that none are broken after change
  • Could be done on within a directory or a note scope
    • Note would be much faster and useful when editing a note
  • Storing file hash, or just the last modified time could be good enough
    • If we use a file hash, we could include one for the directory to speed up finding which subset of the tree contains the change (similar to a Merkle Tree).

Graveyard

UUID Linking

This was planned to be implemented, and may be in the future, but for now this plan has been graveyard-ed. It feels like over-engineering at this stage, and we can ensure that there are no broken links with the carbon tool.

To prevent links between markdown notes from breaking when files are moved around, each markdown notes will have an associated UUIDv4 that will be stored in YAML front-matter within the note.

---
uuid: be7f834c-56f4-49f1-b19d-4fefeff4561d 
---
# Some note about stuff

blah blah blah

These will be automatically added when creating a note with a template, or can be generated with carbon uuid new.

The IDs will be used instead of paths to notes and will be replaced by the absolute path to the note at render time.

To find the path of a note, we will perform a full scan of the notes-dir/, excluding _rendered/ and _static/. This way, UUIDs are explicitly and directly attached to a file which may move or be renamed (another form of moving).

We will also include a command carbon uuid find UUID where we can provide a UUID and get back the path of the file that the UUID is attached to.