I have been using it for a year or so and have been re-thinking of this software for some time. I would like to re-design it and make it more useful for general purpose (and surely for myself).
1.4.4 is the last stable version of existing functionality.
Next release will be a re-implementation of whole software, versioned starting from 2.0.0.
Back to the time when I was preparing the final examinations as a bachelor student. I wrote down all the concepts to a big white paper in a structured way in order to review what I have learned. I draw lines between concepts and labeled the relationship. For each concept, I wrote some text describing it (usually the paper was too small for large trunk of text).
After Emacs and its decent Org Mode became best partner for my electronic life, I always wanted a software that helps me record everything in a structured way, like described above.
I found org-brain. I used it for some time, but there were some drawbacks that made me stop using it:
- Issue #127 is a very important reason. Not being able to use rich-text in it really made me sad. (This issue has been fixed now.)
- Although it is doable via
org-brain-rename-file, but the inconsistency between file name and concept name made me uncomfortable, really. - I was concerned about the performance of plain text when the number of concepts grow too large.
Silver Brain is a Brain like software and is directly inspired by org-brain. It helps you build your very own personal knowledge center.
It has the following features:
- Edit concepts using Emacs Org Mode (or probably other major modes in future).
- Maintain the relationship between concepts, including paternity and friendship.
The following technical decisions were made:
- Concepts are stored in a single SQLite file. Easy to maintain and synchronize.
- Separation between back-end and front-end. This makes it possible to develop
another UI. The directory
web-ui/contains a proof-of-concept demonstration. - Back-end code was written in Common Lisp (a bless or a curse).
Please refer to CHANGELOG.org.
Make sure SQLite 3 is installed on your system.
It is essential for the following installation process. And it is a good idea if you would like to load silver-brain using ASDF during manual installation.
- When using Roswell, you may simply create a symbolic link of
silver-brain
directory in ~/.roswell/local-projects/ directory.
- Otherwise, you need to add the path of Silver Brain to
asdf:*central-registry*.
An installation script is provided for the sake of quick installation. Before
running it, you need to put Silver Brain project under a directory that your
local ASDF can find, i.e. (ql:quickload :silver-brain) does work.
cd /path/to/silver-brain/
./install.shIt mainly does the following things:
- Build back-end server using Roswell.
- Install the generated binary to
~/.roswell/bin/directory. - Copy Emacs Lisp files to
~/.silver-brain/directory.
You may need to add ~/.roswell/bin/ to your PATH in order to use
silver-brain anywhere.
It is highly recommended to use Roswell to build and install Lisp systems for its simplicity.
cd /path/to/silver-brain/backend/
ros build silver-brain.rosIt is a little bit complicated not to use Roswell. You may load Silver Brain into an image and dump it.
See The Common Lisp Cookbook for more details.
Copy the emacs/ directory to somewhere Emacs can find.
The server uses 5000 as the port. Currently this cannot be changed unless
modifying the source code.
For Emacs UI to work, the following snippet needs to be added into the Emacs configuration file:
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.silver-brain/emacs/")
(use-package silver-brain
:init
;; The port of back-end server. Does NOT affect server side.
(setq silver-brain-server-port 5000)
:bind
("C-c b" . silver-brain))The core concept of Silver Brain is concept. A concept a node in your knowledge network. It contains title, content etc.
Concepts are connected via relations. A concept can be either parent, child or friend of another one. You may think of parent/child as a single directional link, while friend is a bi-directional link.
Practically, parent/child can be used to connect concepts with logical
precedence, e.g. Editor and Emacs. And friend can be used to connect
concepts with slightly weak relations, e.g. Emacs and Vim, hopefully ;-)
The back-end server accepts -h or --help argument. Please refer to the
help.
For Emacs side, the command silver-brain is the entry point of the software.
The following is a list of commands defined for silver-brain-mode:
| Command | Binding | Description |
|---|---|---|
| silver-brain-refresh | g | Refresh current concept |
| silver-brain-new-concept | n | Create a new concept |
| silver-brain-rename | r | Rename current concept |
| silver-brain-save | s | Save changes of current concept |
| silver-brain | o | Open a new concept |
| silver-brain-new-window | O | Open a new concept in new window |
| silver-brain-delete | d | Delete current concept |
| silver-brain-add-parent | p | Add a parent of current concept |
| silver-brain-add-child | c | Add a child of current concept |
| silver-brain-add-friend | f | Add a friend of current concept |
| silver-brain-remove-relation | R | Remove a relational concept |
| silver-brain-kill-concept | q | Kill the concept window |
| silver-brain-kill-all-concepts | Q | Kill all the concept windows |
Silver Brain was designed as a traditional Web application that back-end and front-end code communicates via HTTP requests. The concepts and relations are stored in a local SQLite file.
The web-ui directory contains browser UI code written using Vuetify.
If you use a synchronization software, such as Syncthing, you may need to restart the software after the DB file got synchronized.
This is because the database needs to be re-connected while the current version of Silver Brain cannot handle it well.
If you run silver-brain-refresh after some modification and says yes to
save the new contents, you may notice that the content buffer reverts to the
original state.
The solution is simply refreshing the buffer again.
This is because when silver-brain-save is triggered, the modifications are
not transferred to the server, thus the first silver-brain-refresh command
will receive the old content.
Because Mito and Clack quickload its dependencies at run-time dynamically,
the dependency packages cannot be built into the image. So after upgrading
Quicklisp dist, you need to re-build the Roswell binary.