Tycho v 0.0.5

Tycho is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) partially inspired by the commercial Windows software Info Select. Its primary platform is Linux, but efforts will be made to ensure that it run on Mac OSX and Windows.

Tycho is open source, distributed under the same license as Ruby. The project page is on Rubyforge, and contributions to the design and code are welcome.

By "PIM" we do not mean just another electronic Rolodex or contact manager. Tycho is for the quick storage and retrieval of large amounts of loosely-structured data. There is a hierarchy of topics, and each topic consists of a group of notes. Currently the notes are simply text.

Typical notes might be:

• Names, phone numbers, addresses, email
• URLs and similar references
• References to books, articles, authors
• References to songs, movies
• To-do items (with no special support)
• Quotations, jokes, etc.
• Ideas and random thoughts
• Diary/journal/blog entries
• Code fragments
• Many other things

Some of the design goals are as follows:

• Information storage and retrieval should be fast and flexible
• The app should expose an API for external manipulation by Ruby scripts
• The app should be internally scriptable (extensible) in Ruby

In its current early stages, Tycho falls short of these goals. This help file should always reflect its current capabilities, but the release notes may be slightly more up to date.

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Working with topics

• Create a new topic
  

  To create a new topic, use Topic|New from the menu. You will be prompted for a name, and the new topic will go under the currently selected one. Alternatively, make sure that your focus is in the tree list on the left, and press Insert. The effect is the same.

  To cancel creating a new topic, press Escape or close the prompt window.
  
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• Rename a topic
  

  Use the menu item Topic|Rename; you will be prompted for the new name. You can also right-click on a topic name in the tree. Finally, you can manually change the title by editing the topic metadata (but this is overkill).
  
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• Edit topic metadata
  

  Select Topic|Metadata from the menu. Editing is very crude at present. Be very careful, as it is currently possible to scramble the metadata badly enough that Tycho will crash while reading it.
  
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• Delete topic
  

  Not currently implemented.
  
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• Reordering topics
  

  Not currently implemented.
  
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• Sorting topics
  

  Not currently implemented.
  
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• Create a new note
  Select Note|New from the menu; or press Insert while the focus is in the middle pane or right pane. You will be prompted for a title. Edit the note by clicking on its text area. In its early versions, Tycho's right pane is a little tricky; ensure that you are not being prompted for a new topic title.
  
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• Edit a note
  To edit a note, do one of these three operations:
  • Select Note|Edit from the menu;
  • Select the note's title in the middle pane and press Enter; or
  • Click on the text area of the note.
  To end editing, press Escape or simply click on the right pane outside any note. Currently notes are always saved; there is no revert or undo.
  
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• Rename a note
  Select Note|Rename or right-click on the note's title bar.
  
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• Edit note metadata
  Select Note|Metadata from the menu. Be very careful, as it is currently possible to scramble the metadata badly enough that Tycho will crash while reading it.
  
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• Delete note
  Delete a note in one of four ways:
  • Note|Delete from the menu;
  • Select the note in the middle pane and press Delete;
  • Click the note's title bar and press Delete; or
  • Click the close icon on the note window.
  Deleting a note is currently irreversible.
  
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• Change layout
  Not currently implemented.
  
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• Reordering notes
  Not currently implemented.
  
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• Sorting notes
  Notes can be sorted in a variety of ways via the Sort notes menu. Refer to the sort description in the metadata discussion below. (This menu will likely be moved under the Note menu later.)
  
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• Sorting inside notes
  Refer to the autosort description in the metadata discussion below.
  
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• Notes as scripts
  A note can be run as a script by selecting Note|Run from the menu. (This is as dangerous as it sounds.) A note has to have the metadata item script set to true to enable this. Internally, a simple eval is performed; this will change later. The script in the note has access to the Tycho API, including such items as DataStore.current to refer to the current topic, and including GUI convenience methods such as get_string and notify.
  
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• Notes and external apps
  
  
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• Searching globally
  To search the entire tree of data, select Search|Globally or press the Search button. (The latter may go away later.) The displayed notes may be navigated and edited normally. To end search mode, press the End Search button.
  
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• Searching within a subtree
  To search the current topic and its subtopics, select Search|Within topic. The displayed notes may be navigated and edited normally. To end search mode, press the End Search button.
  
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• Advanced searching
  Not currently implemented.
  Planned features include:
  • Searching titles and metadata
  • Incremental searching of strings
  • Suffix tree for fast searching
  • Search by regular expression
  
  
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Some of these are metadata assigned automatically, such as the creation and modification dates. Some are assigned manually, but have special meaning. Finally, there is the possibility for the user to define arbitrary custom metadata to be used in a specialized way.

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• Standard metadata
  Some pieces of metadata have standard meanings. The existing ones are shown here.

  	title		The title of the topic or note
  	created		Creation date/time of the topic/note.
  	modified		Last modified date/time of the topic/note.
  	accessed		Last selected/searched date/time of the topic/note.
  	width		Note window width (may be phased out).
  	height		Note window height (may be phased out).
  	x		Note window x coordinate (may be phased out).
  	y		Note window y coordinate (may be phased out).
  	sort		For topics, not yet implemented; for notes, the valid values are these:           title Sort alpha by title. -title Sort alpha reverse by title. firstline Sort alpha by first line of note. -firstline Sort alpha reverse by first line of note. oldest Sort by creation date (oldest first) newest Sort by creation date reverse (newest first) recent Sort by modification date (most recent first) -recent Sort by modification date (least recent first) often Sort by frequency of access (most often first) -often Sort by frequency of access (least often first) seldom Same as -often -seldom Same as often manual Sort manually (not yet implemented) manual Sort manually reverse (not yet implemented)
  	actions		An array of two-element arrays. Each pair corresponds to a button added onto the note. The first element will be the button's label; the second will be a command line to be executed via system().
  	script		If true, this script can be run with Note|Run
  	autosort		If true, do an alpha sort of the lines of the note after each edit.

  
  
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• Custom metadata

  Any valid Ruby method name can be the name of a metadata item. You may set these at will and retrieve their values as subfields of the metadata field of a note (e.g., note.metadata.foobar).
  
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• Metadata inheritance

  There are plans to allow inheritance of metadata from one topic to another or from a topic to its notes. This is not yet implemented, and it is still uncertain how it should work.

Support is very incomplete at the moment. Here are some operations that work at least partially:

	app = Tycho.new		Start a Tycho instance and load the datastore
	DataStore.current		Return the current topic (as an object).
	app.find_topic(key)		Find and open the top-level topic named by "key" (which may be a string or regex). If there is more than one, an exception is raised.
	app.find_topics(key)		Find every top-level topic named by "key" (which may be a string or regex). An array is returned.
	app.find_topic!(key)		Find and open a topic named by "key" (which may be a string or regex). If there is more than one, the first will be used. The entire tree is searched.
	app.find_topics!(key)		Find every topic named by "key" (which may be a string or regex). An array is returned. The entire tree is searched.
	app.new_topic(topic_name)		Create a new top-level topic. A Topic object is returned, to which you may add subtopics and notes.
	topic.new_topic(topic_name)		Create a new subtopic under topic. A Topic object is returned, to which you may add other subtopics and notes.
	topic.new_note(title,contents)		Create a new note under topic, with the given title and contents. A Note object is returned.
	note.metadata.title = str		Change the title of a note. Any other piece of metadata may be accessed, changed, or added on the fly in the same way.
	topic.notes		A list of Note objects for the specified topic.

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