Code Blocks

There's a new paragraph type called code. Most notably this will set the text in a monospaced font and add a subtle background.

Code paragraphs also behave a bit differently. By default, pressing Tab at the start of code paragraphs will insert spaces, instead of the normal indentation. You can configure this behaviour in the settings dialog. The code paragraph uses Ctrl+9 as a keyboard shortcut. This meant we had to switch some of the previous paragraph shortcuts. You can find the new shortcuts in the paragraph menu. And of course you can change them in the settings.

This is only a start though. You will soon be able to run some code too, directly withing Lemma. Expect more news about this feature in the next update.

And there's more. We added an overview graph, showing all of your documents at once. You can zoom and scroll it too. We worked on the colors and typography of the sidebar, making it more easy to scan. And we made numerous little tweaks and fixes.

Graph Views

There's a new panel in the Lemma sidebar called the Graph View. It shows all pages in the neighborhood (one link away) of the current page, and the links among those pages too. Here's what it looks like:

I did a lot of experimenting with different layouts, in the end settling for the spring_layout function of the networkx library, which uses the Fruchterman-Reingold layout algorithm. It's reasonably fast and usually produces good layouts, at least as far as my test cases go.

There is still a lot of room for improvement. I want to add zoom and panning, visually distinguish backlinks, and the layouts too could be better with some more tweaks to the algorithm. But the big priority is now adding an overview graph to show all pages at once. I hope to have more graph news soon.

New News Section

Welcome to the news section. I'm planning to post updates from the project here at least once a month.

This month I finished a big code refactoring project. This should make development faster and more efficient going forward.

I also started using Lemma more extensively (aka dogfooding). This resulted in the fixing of a large number of small annoyances, that I hadn't noticed before. The weblink recognition when pasting text was improved, scrolling positions are now remembered when going back in the history, and many more.

The most noticeable change was probably the removal of the time below document titles. It used to show the time of the last edit. But that info is already visible in the sidebar. Also it would mostly just show the current time, because I just made some change to the document on display. The page titles look a bit nicer now.