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Introduction
This document is the user documentation for imag, the personal information management suite for the commandline. Besides being a documentation, it serves also as "roadmap" where this project should go.
Basically: This is Hobby stuff. Expect incompleteness, false statements and generally read with big grain of salt.
If you have any objections, suggestions for improvements, bugs, etc, please file them. A way to reach out to the imag project maintainer(s) is described in the CONTRIBUTING file of the repository or in this document, in the appropriate section.
The Problem
The problem this project tries to solve is to provide a modular commandline application for personal information management.
It targets "power users" or "commandline users", uses plain text as a storage format and tries to be scriptable. imag offers the ability to link data from different "PIM aspects" (such as "diary" and "bookmark" for example).
One major goal of imag is to make the PIM data traverseable and queryable. For example: a wiki article can be linked to an appointment which is linked to a todo which is linked to a note which is linked to a contact.
imag wants to offer an all-in-one scriptable modular commandline personal information management suite for all PIM aspects one can think of. Because imag uses plain text (TOML headers for structured data and plain text which can be rendered using markdown, for example, for continuous text) the user is always able to access their data without the imag tools at hand.
The Approach
The approach "imag" takes on solving this problem is to store content in a "store" and persisting content in a unified way. Meta-information is attached to the content which can be used to store structured data. This can be used to implement a variety of "domain modules" using the store. While content is stored in one place, imag does not duplicate content. imag does not copy or move icalendar files, emails, vcard files, music or movies to the store, but creates references to the actual files and stores meta-information in the store.
Detailed explanation on this approach follows in the chapters of this work.
Implementation
The program is written in the Rust programming language.
The program consists of libraries which can be re-used by other projects to implement and adapt imag functionality. An external program may use a library of the imag distribution to store content in the store of imag and make it visible to imag this way.
This is a technical detail a user does not necessarily need to know, but as imag is intended for power-users anyways, we could say it fits here.
Alternative Projects
imag is not the only project which tries to solve that particular problem. For example there is org mode for the emacs text editor. There is also zim, a desktop wiki editor which is intended to be used for a personal wiki.
The difference between imag and the mentioned projects is that imag is not there yet. Some parts can be used, though it is far away from being feature-complete.