Rucola: Markdown notes manager

General Made with Ratatui
1

I’m a big terminal user, and I take all my zettelkasten-style notes in markdown format using a terminal text editor helix to be specific).

One thing I was missing when using almost exclusively the terminal was the possibility to view more high-level information and connection between my notes (such as backlinks in obsidian), or to quickly rename files while changing links in all other notes accordingly.
Additionally, I take a lot of math notes and pure LaTeX formula code is hard to read, so I searched for a terminal-based programm that could convert my markdown notes to HTML with compiled LaTeX to easily view in a browser.
When I couldn’t find such a program, I created one myself and rucola is the result.
Imagine it a as a small file browser particularly suited for markdown notes, viewing stats, following links and launching editors & viewers.

You can find the repository here: GitHub - Linus-Mussmaecher/rucola: Terminal-based markdown note manager.

An example image while viewing connections of a single one of my notes:

readme-image-display
readme-image-display944×565 63.3 KB

It’s still a a bit of a work in progress (after releasing, I found that cross-plattform was not quite as plug-and-play as I had hoped and the windows version is a bit buggy), but I already use it daily in my workflow.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

2 Likes
2

What sort of bugs are you hitting on windows?
If it’s double reading keys (pretty common), check that event.kind == KeyEventKind::Press

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Nothing ratatui related - for one, the notify crate seems to not notice file events for some windows users, which I’m trying to replicate at the moment. Another problem is related to Windows using \ for file paths, while I’m using / internally.

Actually, I’m pleasantly surprised how well cross-plattform is working with Rust in general and ratatui in specific. Only had one crate that didn’t complile on Windows, and that was clearly marked in the docs. The rest worked flawless, and looks just as nice in the windows terminal as in my Linux ones.