Lib.rs

Basalt  

TUI Application to manage Obsidian notes    

TUI Application to manage Obsidian vaults and notes directly from the terminal ✨.

Installation

For now unfortunately, you have to compile this binary yourself, if you want to run basalt. The next thing I'll be doing is adding a GitHub workflow to produce cross-platform binaries.

Install basalt using cargo:

cargo install basalt-tui

Background

This is something that has been brewing in my head for quite some time. There has been different incarnations over the years, however, nothing as substantial as this.

I have been using Neovim and the official Obsidian app. However, I wanted to have something dedicated that offers the same writing experience as Neovim, but has more WYSIWYG experience as in the official Obsidian app. I'm fully aware of (obsidian.nvim)https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim, which many people use and find more than sufficient. However, I want to see images, beautified text, note graphs, etc. I want it to be a bit more.

The problem for me personally is that when I leave the terminal, my flow breaks, especially if I'm writing. Using an entirely different app disrupts that flow, and it annoys me. So here I am, building a TUI for Obsidian.

The goal of basalt is not to replace the Obsidian app. Basalt is to fill and cater for a need to have a terminal view to the selection of notes and vaults, providing quick access from anywhere in the terminal with a simple command.

Keybindings

For now these are not configurable, but this will change when the configuration file is supported.

q Quit the application

? Show help

t Toggle side panel visibility and select mode

k Move selection up

j Move selection down

↑ / ↓ Scroll selected up / down

↩ Enter Select the highlighted note

Space Toggle vault selector modal

Ctrl-u Scroll up half a page

Ctrl-d Scroll down half a page

Task List

• Add rudimentary support for markdown rendering
• Add Sidepanel for note selection in vault
• Add bottom information bar that shows the current mode Select, Normal, Insert and statistics for words and characters
• Add help modal / popup with ?
• Add vault selection screen with basalt logo (Splash screen)
• Add vault selector modal
• GitHub Workflows !
  • Run tests and build
  • Run create release artifacts (cross-platform binaries)
  • Run vhs when basalt dir changes and commit it to the current PR
• Async file loading (tokio)
• Persistent scroll state in help modal
• Fuzzy search in panes (note, sidepanel, modals)
• Markdown rendering
  • Add support to all markdown nodes
  • Add text formatting to different styles like Fraktur and DoubleStruck for heading purposes
  • Improve and fix codeblock rendering so it appears as a 'block'
  • Support complete Obsidian Flavor
  • Add image rendering support
• Note tree
  • Create new note under vault
  • Collapsible folders
  • Notes within Folders in vault
  • Move note
  • Rename note
  • Delete note under vault (with confirmation modal)
• Editor mode
  • Editor mode should change to raw text where cursor is. Only changes the current markdown node. Text is inserted node by node.
  • Edit and save notes
  • Support some vim keybindings to get started (vim mode should be configurable option)
  • Easy text yanking
• Command bar
  • Add ability to invoke command bar with :
  • Add commands for saving :w and quitting :q
  • Switch between scrollbar and paging using a command :set scroll or :set paging. Paging will only fit the content it can within the height of the rect and generate pages accordingly.
• Configuration file (.basalt.toml)
  • Add rudimentary config file and move keybinds to the file
• Wrap lines with prefix (calculate width and add length of prefix)
• Easy backups with Git (Config, (git2-rs)https://github.com/rust-lang/git2-rs)
• Integration tests using https://core.tcl-lang.org/expect/index
• When creating a link show autocomplete tooltip list of potential files to link to
• Add features to basalt-core and basalt-widgets. Default feature set and individual features.
• Clickable checkboxes

I want to help

I haven't yet had the chance to add a contributors' guide. If you would like to help, please feel free to create a pull request directly. At this stage, opening a separate issue is not required unless you would like to start a discussion first.

Please note that this process may change in the future. The expected contribution flow will likely become: Create issue → Create pull request.