Refactored design

[countvajhula]

Summary of Changes

This proposes essential design changes to Mindstream.

Addresses #7 #8 #9 #18 #23.

The rendered design document can be viewed here: Mindstream Design

To locally build the design doc and view it in a browser, you will need to have Racket installed. Then:

$ make design

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[countvajhula]

I've drafted a document describing the proposed new UX @nobiot @greghendershott (rendered HTML linked in the description).

The purpose of the design refactor is to naturally support the notion of "sessions" on anonymous repos as well as existing projects, to further support the goal of being able to organically scale from absolutely nothing all the way up to a large scale project.

The essential change that's required for this is for "sessions" to be modeled by Git branches, so that beginning a session on an existing repo, at any commit, translates to just starting a branch there. This allows us to use Mindstream in existing projects without worrying about the noisy commits, since the mindstream branch could be squash-merged (and perhaps deleted) whenever it has served its purpose.

This is still a draft, and it would be valuable to have your feedback on it (and already incorporates some of our discussions). It uses an experimental notation intended to make it easy and unambiguous to discuss the UX. You're welcome to submit PRs against this PR to propose any modifications, but if you feel the notation is confusing we don't have to use it at all! I'm also happy to incorporate any suggestions into the document as we go.

We could consider this an "RFC" phase, where we incorporate any feedback or ideas into the document to arrive at a final design. Say after a few weeks (I know you mentioned you are busy at least till mid-June @nobiot), or whenever we feel it's ready, we could transition to working on the implementation, if you are interested and available of course (no pressure at all - just a fun opportunity).

Thanks so much folks. I feel Mindstream can be a widely useful tool, and with your help I'm sure it'll get there.

[nobiot]

Thank you. Will come back in June :)

[countvajhula]

Hello friends!

I was just taking stock today of what work the refactored design entails, and I'm realizing that it's not a lot. The recent work on #27 brought us closer by reducing reliance on global state, so I think there's just a few things to do on this before Mindstream can be used anywhere, with a good UX, even on existing repos!

I'd love to get to this in the near future and then write a nice blog post officially announcing the package, since there actually hasn't been an announcement of any kind so far.

This week, I'm focused on doing a new release of Qi with the nice folks in the Racket community (the release party on Friday is open to everyone -- feel free to stop by!)

But I'm thinking of jumping into this soon after that, in the trailing weeks of January. I'll aim to create issues to track the work that's needed, as well as add a task breakdown to the PR description. If you'd like to help out, as always, you're very welcome to. The more the merrier - but if not, no worries at all.

Really the one thing I will say is that Emacs completion is still very much black magic to me. Every time I've looked at it I've had a really hard time understanding how it works and how to make it do what I want. So I'm sure I could at least use help on this part.

I'll follow up soon!