The canvas draws a frame in three steps. Scene::build works out what's shown and where: folding decides which nodes show, boxes are sized from their wrapped titles (with tags and a +N badge in the bottom border), the camera turns canvas positions into screen cells, and every branch and cross-link gets a right-angle route. The line layer records which arms meet in each cell, so borders and lines join with the right box-drawing character (├ ┼ ┨ ╭), in any mix of light, thick, double, dashed and dotted. Rendering then writes lines, arrowheads and labels, and the nodes on top. Branches leave sideways and bend near their parent, so siblings share one bus; cross-links take the wider gap and carry their label on the longest level run. Far zoom keeps the full width and halves the height (one line per node), Overview shows dots. hjkl picks the nearest node within 45° of the direction, and new nodes find a free spot next to their parent or sibling. The theme works out looks in layers (default, tag style, named style, the node's own), with a mid-tone palette for dark and light terminals, and an ASCII fallback for fonts without box drawing. `cargo run --example canvas` opens a sample document to move around, zoom, fold, edit and drag with the mouse. The tests compare rendered text against the DESIGN.md mockup. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
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cumulus
Brainstorm in the terminal: ideas as nodes on a 2D canvas, connected, folded and color-coded, across as many documents as you like. Vim keys first; the mouse works too. Runs on Windows and Linux.
Status: being built, one stage at a time. See DESIGN.md for the plan; this README grows with the app.
Build and run
You need Rust (rustup.rs). The exact version is pinned in
rust-toolchain.toml, and rustup installs it by itself the first time.
cargo build --release
The program is target/release/cumulus (cumulus.exe on Windows): copy it to
a folder on your PATH.
- Windows: nothing else to install. The
.execarries its own C runtime and runs on any Windows 10 or 11. - Linux (Void, Fedora…): build the same way. You can also build a static
Linux binary from Windows with
cargo linux: it lands intarget/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release/cumulusand runs on any distribution.
Keys
The plan for the everyday keys (all of them are in DESIGN.md):
| Keys | What they do |
|---|---|
hjkl |
move to the nearest node that way |
gh gj gk gl |
parent, next sibling, previous sibling, first child |
o O a |
new sibling below / above, new child |
i or Enter |
edit the title |
dd x |
delete the branch / just the node |
u Ctrl-r |
undo / redo |
za zf zi |
fold, auto-fold, focus |
+ - |
zoom in / out |
C M v |
connect, move, select |
<Space> |
the action menu |
: ? |
command line, help |
After the first key of a sequence (g, z, d, <Space>…), a popup lists
what can follow.
Development
cargo test # run the tests
cargo lint # clippy, treating warnings as errors
cargo fmt # format the code
While the app is being built, the examples try out each part:
cargo run --example canvas # the canvas, on a sample document
cargo test show_canvas -- --ignored --nocapture # print it at each zoom, as text