Seam tutorial

Installation

To install Seam, clone https://git.plexwave.org/seam and add it to your load-path.

If you’re using Windows and don’t have the Unix find and grep commands, you will need to install them.

Basic setup

To use Seam, you must set seam-note-directory. There is no default. For our purposes I highly recommend using an empty directory. Seam can create it if it doesn’t exist.

You should also bind seam-prefix-map to a key of your choice. It’s recommended to do this with use-package, as it can autoload the Seam package for you. Otherwise, you’ll need to put (require 'seam) in your init.el. 

(use-package seam
  :load-path "path/to/seam"
  :bind-keymap* ("C-c s" . seam-prefix-map))

I will use <S> to mean whatever key you’ve bound the prefix map to.

Create a note

Press <S> f and enter Hello, world!. This will create a note like so: 

* Hello, world!

This note will automatically be saved to your note directory at private/hello-world.org.

When you create your first note, you should get a prompt about potentially unsafe local variables. Seam requires a directory-local hook to work properly, and you’ll have to press ! to permanently accept this.

Export it

Let’s set up seam-export-alist so Seam knows which notes to export and to where. 

(setq seam-export-alist
      '(("/tmp/seam-tutorial"
         :types ("public"))))

Here we are specifying the desired output directory for our HTML files, and the note types that will be exported.

By default, Seam defines two note types: private and public. New notes default to being private, so this is an opt-in approach to exporting.

Now, press <S> t and enter public. This will make it a public note and export it automatically. Visit file:///tmp/seam-tutorial/hello-world.html in your web browser to check it out!

Setting it to private will delete the HTML file again.

Link to another note

Press <S> l and enter a new title to create another note.

Experiment with setting each note to public or private. An outgoing link is only present in the HTML when the link’s target is public. The Backlinks section will likewise only show incoming links from public notes.

Rename a note

Edit the title headline of the note you just created. Whenever you save it, these things will happen:

If you try titling it something like “hello world…”, its filename would conflict with our first note, and Seam will not let you save. This is something that rarely comes up in practice, but it’s good to know about.

Delete a note

Press <S> k to delete a note, kill its buffer, and remove any associated HTML files. As with renaming, any other affected notes are re-exported.

Search notes

The final command to mention is <S> s. It works like grep-find to search your note directory for a given regexp.

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