Bear-note-graph 🐻🐍

Note: Still WIP, not as thoroughly tested as I would have liked

This is a simple CLI to generate a Graphviz-powered graph of your notes in Bear.

Example

This is an example in PNG format, with the flag --anonymise, which you can use in case you want to show your own graph but avoid showing the titles of your notes ¯\﹍(ツ)﹍/¯

If you use the default output (PDF) you will get clickable links to notes and tags (BUT ONLY ON iOS, Preview for Mac does not open app links). I recommend you copy your graph to iCloud if you want clicking. You can see an example of the PDF here (although it is anonymised as well).

Installation

You need an environment with at least Python 3.7, and

pip install bear-note-graph

Installing graphviz

To generate the graph, the sfdp command from Graphviz needs to be available, and for some settings (like, if you want to change overlap modes) you may need to reinstall to add gts. For this, you should have homebrew available.

brew uninstall graphviz --ignore-dependencies
brew install gts
brew install graphviz

Usage

usage: bear-note-graph [-h] [--config [config]] [--dump-config]
                       [--dump-palette] [--anonymise] [--only-tags]
                       [--only-notes] [--debug]

bear-note-graph generates a Graphviz graph of your Bear notes

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --config [config]  Configuration file to use. Use --dump-config-file to get
                     a sample
  --dump-config      Print the default configuration file and exit
  --dump-palette     Print the default palette file and exit
  --anonymise        Mangle the tags and link names preserving 'look'
  --only-tags        Show only tag links
  --only-notes       Show only note links
  --debug            Set logging to debug level

You just need to run bear-note-graph after installing, by default everything will be output in /tmp/.

Configuration file

This is straight from the defaults

graph:
  anonymise: False                         # Make the output anonymous
  max_label_length: 50                     # Max length to show of the notes/tags
  include_only_tags: ""                    # Generate graph only for these tags (comma separated)
  exclude_titles: "readings,> "            # Skip all notes with titles containing this (comma separated)
  exclude_tags: "journal,@"                # Skip all tags containing this (comma separated)
  show_tag_edges: True                     # Whether to show tags and the linking between tags and notes
  show_note_edges: True                    # Whether to show note edges
  prune: False                             # Remove all notes with no tags (useful for include_only)
  overlap: False                           # Overlap mode for nodes in the graph
  sep: "+90,90"                            # Margins around nodes
  splines: True                            # Whether to use splines for the arrows
  bgcolor: "solarized-dark.base02"         # Background colour for the graph
  free_form: "K=0.9"                       # Any additional parameters to Graphviz
  tmp: "/tmp"                              # Temporary folder for the copy of the Bear SQLite database
  destination: "/tmp/bear_graph"           # Default destination for the Graphviz result
  output_format: "pdf"                     # Format of the output graphviz (only useful if run_graphviz is set)
  run_graphviz: "sfdp"                     # Algorithm to run automatically sfdp or neato recommended

tag:
  shape: "folder"                          # Shape
  style: "rounded,filled"                  # Style
  fill_color: "solarized-dark.yellow"      # Fill
  strike_color: "solarized-dark.orange"    # Stroke
  free_form: ""

note:
  shape: "note"
  style: "filled"
  fill_color: "solarized-dark.cyan"
  strike_color: "solarized-dark.blue"
  free_form: ""

tag_link:
  strike_color: "solarized-dark.magenta"
  arrowhead: "none"                        # Arrowhead
  free_form: "penwidth=\"2.5\""            # You can add any additional parameters

note_link:
  strike_color: "solarized-dark.green"
  arrowhead: "normal"
  free_form: "penwidth=\"2.5\""

custom_palette_here:                       # You can inline palettes here
  screaming_color: "#AAAAAA"               # You can inline palettes here

Most of the configuration parameters are for Graphviz, so check them in their documentation.

The Markdown parsing

In case you are curious, I wrote a custom Markdown parser. Because, why not, and I wanted to play with parser combinators. It is not as thoroughly tested as I would like, and it also has issues with blank spaces around the nodes, but for the purpose I wanted it, it works.

The anonymisation

This is just so I can show my own graph without showing the tags or note titles. It's based on a relatively good hashing algorithm, and does some tweaking to make it look "realistic".