Foucault

A small terminal UI note-taking app.

Note : Demo made using the Helix editor for editing notes and scraped data from Wikipedia to fill the notebook.

Install Foucault

Shell Installer

Thanks to cargo-dist, an installer script exists to install foucault with just one command.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/Adi-df/foucault/releases/download/v0.3.2/foucault-installer.sh | sh

Binaries

Look through Releases for binaries and MSI installers.

Building from source

The easiest way to build foucault from source is to use the just command runner.

# Clone the foucault repo
git clone https://github.com/Adi-df/foucault
# Use build-release to build using optimisation
just build-release
# Use prepare-queries and build-dev to build using the dev profile
just prepare-queries
just build-dev

Usage

Creating your first notebook

Foucault is based on the notion of Notebook which contains notes, tags, etc. It exposes a CLI app made with clap to manage notebooks. To create your first notebook, use foucault create [NAME]. Then open it with foucault open [NAME].

Using foucault to take notes

The keymap is detailed when toggling the help bar with CTRL+H.

Editing notes works with an external editor set by the EDITOR env variable, so that you may use your favorite editor. Notes are taken in Markdown with (limited) support. It supports making cross-references between notes by using [[NOTE_NAME]].

Exposing a notebook / Connecting to one

Foucault supports accessing remote notebooks : Expose the notebook through foucault serve [NAME]. And connect to it with foucault connect http://remotenotebookadress.org.

Is it any good ?

Probably not.

Foucault is just a side project I made to take notes in philosophy courses. There are probably plenty of bugs, it's inefficient and missing a lot of features. But it still kinda works, so maybe take a look !

Built with

• The fantastic Rust language.
• The smashing clap command parser.
• The amazing Tokio async runtime.
• The wonderful SQLite database through the brilliant SQLx library.
• The awesome axum web framework.
• The incredible ratatui TUI library.
• The terrific just command runner.
• The superb cargo-dist app packager.
• And many other excellent open source crate.