86 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
86 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
# Introduction {#sec:introduction}
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This document is the user documentation for imag, the personal
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information management suite for the commandline.
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**Basically: This is Hobby stuff. Expect incompleteness, false statements and
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generally read with grain of salt.**
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If you have any objections, suggestions for improvements, bugs, etc, please file
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them (See [@sec:contributing]).
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A way to reach out to the imag project maintainer(s) is described in the
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[@sec:contributing] section.
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## The Problem {#sec:intro:problem}
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The problem this project tries to solve is to provide a modular commandline
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application for personal information management.
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It targets "power users" or "commandline users", uses plain text as a storage
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format and tries to be as scriptable as possible.
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imag offers the ability to link data from different "PIM aspects" (such as
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"diary", "contacts" and "bookmark" for example).
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One major goal of imag is to make the PIM data traverseable and queryable.
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For example: a wiki article can be linked to an appointment which is linked to a
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todo which is linked to a note which is linked to a contact.
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imag wants to offer an all-in-one scriptable modular commandline personal
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information management suite for all PIM aspects one could possibly think of.
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Because imag uses plain text (TOML headers for structured data and plain text
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which can be rendered using markdown, for example, for continuous text)
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the user is always able to access their data without the imag tools at hand.
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## The Approach {#sec:intro:approach}
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The approach "imag" takes on solving this problem is to store content in a
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"store" and persisting content in a unified way.
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Meta-information is attached to the content which can be used to store
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structured data.
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This can be used to implement a variety of "domain modules" using the store.
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While content is stored in _one_ place, imag does not duplicate content.
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imag does not copy or move icalendar files, emails, vcard files, music or
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movies to the store, but tries to remember the actual files are and stores
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meta-information about them in the store.
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Detailed explanation on this approach follows in the chapters of this work.
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## Implementation {#sec:intro:implementation}
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The program is written in the Rust programming language.
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The program consists of libraries which can be re-used by other projects
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to implement and adapt imag functionality. An external program may use a
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library of the imag distribution to store content in the store of imag and
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make it visible to imag this way.
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This is a technical detail a user does not necessarily need to know, but as imag
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is intended for power-users anyways, we would say it fits here.
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## Alternative Projects {#sec:intro:alternatives}
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imag is not the only project which tries to solve that particular problem. For
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example there is
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[org mode](https://orgmode.org)
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for the [emacs](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) text editor.
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There is also [zim](http://zim-wiki.org/), a desktop wiki editor which is
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intended to be used for a personal wiki.
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The difference between imag and the mentioned projects is:
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* emacs orgmode is (from what I know and see) for _orgabizing_ things. imag is
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intended not only for organizing, but also for recording, tracking and
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querying.
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* zim is a wiki, which could be used for PIM but is not specialized for it.
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Recording habits might be possible, but not that simple as with imag
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imag is not there
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yet, though. Some parts can be used, though it is far away from being feature-complete.
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In addition: imag is text-editor independent and other tools than imag might be
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used to access data stored in the imag store.
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For example, one could "grep", "awk" and "sed" entries without much hassle and
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even write bash scripts for automatically filling imag entries with data.
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