# Description

Search through personal notes.

I frequently run into problems finding that one specific video or article on the web, or a note I made sometime ago describing a fix to one particular problem that took a long time to research. What this program aims to do is allow you to throw all of that in quickly, and then be able to quickly search through every last bit of it. Cards are used to store information, each card has title, content and tags, with each tag optionally having a value. Then you are able to search through all your cards.

## Example usage

You can add in all the movies, animation and series you have watched (or considering watching). Title of the card being used for the title, content for description, and tags for genres and your personal categories. For example, you can add tags like so: `genre:action genre:drama has:fights director:whateverson`. Then you can find all movies that are `genre:action` and not `genre:drama`, preferably containing word 'explosion' somewhere in the title or description.

You can add link to a video you have watched, and write your own description for it, like `Parkour video about dude using parkour and freerun to go places. I think his name is Xin. Music playing is Give it All by Rise Against.` I would also add tags like `video:video hosting website 1`, so I could just search all cards that have the tag `video`, or specify that the video tag has to have the value `video hosting website 1`.

## In general

The point is, adding something you want to find later, and thinking of a way to add 'hints' for when you will be searching for it later, so you can narrow the search down as much as possible.

# Why create a new program? Alternatives?

Everything I looked at wasn't good enough for me. The things I want:
 - No need to register, works offline.
 - A desktop application, preferably not using HTML.
 - Able to handle throwing _everything_ at it. Thousands of cards, while still:
 - Easily searchable and filterable. The basic 'find notes that contain search terms' doesn't cut it. Sometimes I only want to search through notes of a certain 'type' or a select few types. My 'tag' model solves that.
 - Painless interface.
    - Don't have useless animations that get in the way of using the program.
    - Categorize, optimize. Avoid foot-long context menues, or unfrequent actions listed in always-visible top bar.
 - Preferably pseudo-3 dimensional interface elements, not flat everything. I like to have shadowing and shading creating illusion of protruding objects, because it provides additonal hints of function. I notice buttons and section separation quicker.

# Manual/Guide

## Search bar syntax

You can just type words for searches to return matches in title and content. If you want to search tags you can use `tag:value` or `tag:*` syntax. For more, see this: https://lucene.apache.org/core/3_0_3/queryparsersyntax.html

## Backing up

Not sure how well Lucene, and the way I use it, guards against corruption. So I recommend making backups of the `Database` folder from time to time.

## Compiling / Packaging

Scripts have the extension 'gui_sh' for my convenience, but they're just regular shell scripts. Use 'run.gui_sh' to run the program for development, and 'package.gui_sh' to compile it into a JAR and package everything into a TAR archive. The resulting program should be able to run on any operating system with Java available.

To run from source and package, you need:
 - Java runtime and Java compiler.
 - 'tar' command.

To run packaged version you need:
 - Java runtime.