cvnnote-sharp

canvon notes in C#/.NET

My notes, taken via my favourite editor VIM (vi improved) as plain-text files, follow a rigid formatting. cvnnote-sharp is my second attempt at accessing my valuable notes files programmatically. That is, it provides a library, test cases for the library, a command-line interface (CLI) and a graphical user interface (GUI) which operate on cvnnote files.

The idea this time is: "don't make it too complicated"; rather put something together that can operate on real notes files now, than to make the perfect parser (which reads and converts all the contained data in detail; that took too long to write, and was burdensome to access).

Now I have a GUI which exercises GTK#'s NodeView as a handy foundation, and "under the hood" an INotesElement interface makes uniformly accessible the various parts that make up a notes file parse. It doesn't represent all of the notes file's contents (yet?), but when a node gets selected in the lower half of the GUI main window, the associated plaintext is shown in the upper half. When selecting a "parse issue" (i.e., likely a file formatting error), the plaintext that caused the error/warning gets selected.

ToC

This README contains: (Table of Contents)

• Directory layout, i.e., what can be found where?

• Working environment, or what you need to install/run to work on these projects.

• Contact information, or who wrote this and from where can it be retrieved.

Directory layout

• README.md - this file. Contains an overview over what this is and how to make use of it.

• cvnnote-sharp.sln - the Solution file. Open this in MonoDevelop, or maybe Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio, or maybe run xbuild on it. See Working environment.

• CvnNote - contains the library, with data types to represent important parts of a cvnnote file's structure, and a means to parse a notes file into instances of such data types.

• CvnNote.Tests - contains NUnit unit tests for the library.

• CvnNote.Cli - CLI (command-line interface) for the library. Currently (2016-09-21/-22), it's only very basic; it reads a notes file and dumps the resulting parse to its output again. It tries to represent the resulting tree structure, though.

• CvnNote.Gui - GUI (graphical user interface) for the library. This is the main effort, my notes files have to look good and be accessible in it.

• examples - contains example data to work on. This contains a notes subdirectory with example cvnnote files to load into the GUI. Everything below erroneous is intended to produce parse issues (error messages in the GUI). Currently (2016-09-21/-21), a longer example notes file is still missing. (I don't want to publish my personal notes files as-is, as they may contain information about me or other people that should stay private.)

Working environment

I (Fabian) write and run this software under GNU/Linux, with Mono as CLI (Common Language Infrastructure, usually MS .NET on Windows), providing access to the GTK windowing toolkit library via GTK# ("GTK Sharp"). The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) I use for cvnnote-sharp is MonoDevelop, an unbranded version of Xamarin Studio; under Windows, Visual Studio should also work (if GTK# is installed), as GTK# and GTK are cross-platform, although the GUI Designer for GTK# (MonoDevelop's stetic GUI Designer) would be missing, then. The Designer is only required to change the GUI skeleton, though. It should not be required for simply building or running the application, even after changes to the source code.

In short: I use MonoDevelop on GNU/Linux. On Windows, Visual Studio should be an alternative. It should be able to build the GUI and run it, provided GTK# is installed. For changing the Designer-generated GUI skeleton, you might need to use Xamarin Studio.

If you don't have access to a proper IDE or don't want to use one, you could still try to build the projects via Mono's xbuild command. The binary to run will be found in each project directory as bin/Debug/CvnNote*.exe (if applicable).

Contact

cvnnote-sharp, canvon notes in C#/.NET, has been written by:

• Fabian Pietsch [email protected] (primary author in 2016)

It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 or later.

The project will be hosted on GitHub starting 2016-09-22:

• https://github.com/canvon/cvnnote-sharp