dominiksta/mvtn.el

"Minimum Viable Text Notes" aka mvtn.el - A plaintext databaseless note-taking system for emacs.

mvtn - "Minimum Viable Text Notes"

WARNING: This package is yet to be tested thouroughly and is still subject to breaking changes. Do NOT expect stability just yet. A first release is coming soon™ (or not).

Mvtn is a plain-text note taking system for emacs. The primary guiding principle is simplicity. The core of mvtn should always remain independent of add-on code and as small as reasonable in LOC.

I will write more thourough documentation on release.

Features

• Mvtn is independent of file format. You can use Markdown, org-mode or whatever format you want! (see mvtn-default-file-extension and mvtn-file-extension-templates)
• Backlinks and full text search with ag (the silver-searcher) or rg (ripgrep) (see mvtn-search-backlinks, mvtn-search-full-text and mvtn-search-function)
• View all notes by tag (see mvtn-tag-file-list)
• Keep a controlled vocabulary of tags (see mvtn-cv-file)
• Journaling (see mvtn-journal-new-(quick-)entry)
• Automated journaling (see mvtn-journal-autojournal-set-feature): logging git commits, note edits and org-clock events
• Integration with org-agenda (see mvtn-org-agenda)

Core Concepts and Limitations

To use mvtn effectively, it is necessary to understand some of its core concepts:

• Every note in mvtn has an "id". This is really just a timestamp that is accurate to the second and prefixed to every notes file name. This id must never be changed, because it is used to define links. So a change in the id would break a link. The advantage of using ids is that you can freely rename a note as you please and it will not break links.
• Mvtn does not use a database index. This is a good thing because it makes the code much simpler and independent of other projects and it reduces sync conflicts with tools like Syncthing, Nextcloud, Dropbox, etc. There are some downsides to this approach though:
  • Mvnt can not work with arbitrary folder structures. You will have to define a strict folder structure in your configuration and limit yourself to as few folders as possible to ensure scalability.
  • Notes will be placed in directories for the year a note is taken in. This allows mvtn to ignore old notes by default, making it possible to scale far beyond what is normally possible without an index (see mvtn-search-years)
  • Generating a graph view like that of Obisidian or similar tools is not supported. I might implement this in the future, but it would be a seperate project that would add a datase index to mvtn. I don't really plan on doing that though, so if you need a graph view, then mvtn is not for you.

Performance

Obviously, the perfmance of mvtn will depend on the amount of notes that you take. However, even if you are a very heavy note taker, everything should still be reasonably fast. If you want to read more about the performance or test it yourself, a note generator is available at dominiksta/mvtn.el-performance-test.

Todo-list before release

• Write a thourough documentation in texinfo format
• Performance test with a large amount of generated notes. While the performance with my personal notes is fine (200 notes), this is not a good indication of performance.
• Fail more gracefully when a single note does not have a proper id

Installation

While a release on melpa is eventually planned, this will only happen after the first stable release. If you are interested in trying out the project now, I recommend you use straight.el:

(straight-use-package '(mvtn :type git :host github :repo "dominiksta/mvtn.el"))

Alternatively, you can clone the repository and build a tarball package with make package and then install that file through package-install-file.

Configuration

The most simple configuration only needs to specify the directory structure of your notes. You can refer to the docstring of mvtn-note-directories for this.

As an example, the following snippet will set up two note directories - one for private notes and one for work related notes. Each note directory will have several subdirectories for different categories of notes.

Be warned: Having too many different directories (especially non-datetree directories) will slow things down.

(setq mvtn-note-directories
      '((:dir "~/sync/documents/notes/mvtn" :name "prv" :structure
              ((:dir "flt" :datetree t) ;; fleeting
               (:dir "lit" :datetree t) ;; literature
               (:dir "tec" :datetree t) ;; tech (devlog, etc.)
               (:dir "stc" :datetree nil))) ;; static
        (:dir "~/Documents/work/notes" :name "wrk" :structure
              ((:dir "flt" :datetree t)
               (:dir "tec" :datetree t)
               (:dir "stc" :datetree nil))))) ;; static

For more advanced configuration, you can refer to my (@dominiksta) personal config.

Acknowledgements

Mvnt borrows heavily from several existing emacs packages:

• usls
• org-roam
• zetteldeft

mvtn.el's Issues

Apply `checkdoc` recommendations

Before going live, the recommendations of M-x checkdoc should be applied.

Unit tests should test both native listings and listings using find

See https://github.com/f1rstperson/mvtn.el/blob/da63674b9b90c94bda76d81acbc2df4c515599c2/test/mvtn-test.el#L111