Notebook

In can, your notebook is the collection of all your notes. Using can, you can search and shuffle through these notes and pull them into your writing folder for working with.

The notebook is stored inside your writing folder at .notebook.

Key files are only ever added to your notebook (there are indexes which change, but these are considered secondary and are rebuilt from the key files), so you'll never lose information from your notebook if you keep it safe. The notes themselves are stored as a markdown abstract syntax tree, so even if you can't use the can tool to export your notes right now they can be processed easily using tools like remark

It isn't possible to build cycles in your notes for now. That means that you can't have a note A linking to a note B, which links back to note A. Or even A -> B -> C -> A. This is to avoid issues with storing notes, and you should be warned if you try to add notes which form a cycle to your notebook. If you find that this happens, try making another note with the content that your cycling notes can refer to. Instead of

graph LR A --> B B --> C C --> A

Create a note N and build your notes like this:

graph LR A --> B A --> N B --> C C --> N

This will also help to make your notes more atomic.

Notes aren't stored by name in the notebook, but by address. Each address contains the contents of the note and some metadata.

Backlinks

• Writing Folder
  • In can, your 'writing folder' is the directory on your computer which contains your current working documents and your notebook.
• can-add
  • The can-add command is used to add notes into the notebook from the writing folder.
• can-status
  • The can-status command should report different aspects of the current status of the notebook and writing folder.
• Internal abstract syntax tree
  • can notebooks will store notes as a json representation of a normalised abstract syntax tree.
• can : core concepts
  • the notebook
• can-new
  • The can-new command should create a new writing folder and notebook in the directory they are called in. The writing folder should be named writing-folder and should contain an empty .notebook directory.
• can-note-graph
  • | code | meaning | | 1 | unknown error | | 2 | not run in a directory with a notebook | | 3 | notes form a cycle | | 4 | internal links point to a file which doesn't exist yet |