Inkhaven (blackInkhaven)

Inkhaven is a standalone terminal application for writing books and long-form technical documentation. It pairs a full-screen Typst editor with a local semantic index, an AI writing assistant, versioned snapshots, and a backup pipeline — so the entire writing workflow lives inside one binary, without leaving the terminal.

Your manuscript is organised as a hierarchy of .typ files (Book → Chapter → Subchapter → Paragraph), with first-class image leaves alongside paragraphs. Inkhaven stores metadata in a local DuckDB database, indexes every paragraph for full-text and semantic search, keeps versioned snapshots, and streams answers from your chosen LLM provider — six are bundled (Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Grok, Ollama) and any model genai routes is one HJSON line away.

Latest release · 1.1

Read the full notes: Documentation/RELEASE_NOTES/1.1.md

Headlines:

• First-class images in the project tree with a ratatui-image preview.
• Book assembly → typst compile → PDF pipeline (Ctrl+B A / B / O).
• HJSON-driven settings.typ — change paper, fonts, margins, line spacing in config; the rest is synthesised on every build.
• Six bundled LLM providers, live-switchable via Ctrl+B L.
• AI full-screen layout (Ctrl+B K) with persistent chat history, chat search, and a turn-selection mode that pipes Assistant replies into the editor.
• Document status workflow — cycle None → Napkin → First → … → Ready with Ctrl+B R; filter the project by status with Ctrl+B 1..7.
• Typewriter mode (Ctrl+B W) hides every pane but the editor.
• inkhaven import-typst-help seeds the Help book with a curated typst reference so F1 RAG answers typst questions.
• HJSON as a first-class node type with syntax highlighting.

Every prior release lives under Documentation/RELEASE_NOTES/.

Why Inkhaven

• Terminal-first. Inkhaven runs over SSH, in tmux, on a tiling WM — no browser, no Electron. The TUI uses ratatui and tui-textarea.
• Your manuscript is plain files. A paragraph lives in a .typ file on disk; the metadata database tracks hierarchy and search but the prose is text — you can read it, diff it, version-control it, and edit it with another tool any time.
• Semantic search out of the box. Embeddings via fastembed and HNSW are computed locally. Search for "the moment the lighthouse fails" and find the paragraph even if it never uses those exact words.
• AI is a co-author you steer. Inferences stream live; you control the scope (selection / paragraph / subchapter / chapter / book), the mode (Local-only RAG vs. Full general knowledge), and the destination (replace, insert, top, bottom, copy, grammar-apply).
• Multilingual. Snowball stemmers and multilingual embeddings make Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian and others first-class. The shipped defaults cover English and Russian.
• Help, characters, places, artefacts — built in. Eight system books are seeded on every project: Notes, Research, Prompts, Places, Characters, Artefacts, Typst, Help. Mentions of names from these books light up in the editor (cyan / amber / peach / underline). Ctrl+B P / C / Y / G query each book via RAG. F1 answers questions about Inkhaven itself by RAG over Help.
• First-class images. Drop PNG / JPG / WebP / SVG into the tree; Book assembly emits the right wrap_image_* calls and ships the bytes into the typst tree. Ctrl+B P inside #image("…") opens a sibling picker. Enter on an Image row pops a ratatui-image preview (kitty / sixel / iterm2 / half-block).
• From buffer to PDF in two chords. Ctrl+B A assembles your tree into a typst-compilable directory; Ctrl+B B compiles it; Ctrl+B O builds and copies the PDF into your shell's cwd as <book>-YYYYDDMM-HHMM.pdf. Compile failures route the captured stderr into a fresh AI chat with a typst-aware system prompt.

Features at a glance

Editor

• Typst syntax highlighting via tree-sitter-typst.
• Regex find / replace with same-line current-match highlighting.
• Split-edit with versioned snapshots — see two versions of a paragraph side by side, accept either.
• Word-aware navigation and deletion shortcuts.
• Vertical block selection (Alt+arrows) with rectangular copy.
• System-clipboard cut / copy / paste, plus per-doc undo / redo.
• Live "changes since last save" bolding; grammar-correction highlights what changed after a g apply.

Tree

• Multi-level folding (← / → / Z / X).
• Per-kind row colours (book / chapter / subchapter / paragraph / image)
  • open-paragraph marker.
• Plain-letter shortcuts for add (B/C/V/A/S/+/P), delete (D/-), reorder (U/J).
• Document status badge column — one character per row colour- coded to the workflow stage (n / 1 / 2 / 3 / F / R).
• Mouse: click to focus + select; scroll wheel scrolls.

AI pane

• Streaming markdown rendering — bold / italic / headings / code / lists.
• Six scope modes (cycled by F9): None, Selection, Paragraph, Subchapter, Chapter, Book — each prepends the matching content to the next prompt.
• Two inference modes (F10): Local (use only supplied context) and Full (augment with general knowledge). Help inferences are pinned to Local automatically.
• Persistent chat history with one-key clear (Ctrl+B C).
• Full-screen AI layout (Ctrl+B K) — AI pane + scrollable chat history + AI prompt; persisted to .inkhaven-chat.json between sessions; Ctrl+F searches; Ctrl+C enters a turn-selection mode.
• Lexicon RAG — Ctrl+B P / C / G / Y in the editor sweep the selection through Places / Characters / Notes / Artefacts and prepend the lookup to the next AI prompt.
• F1 Help-manual floating query → grounded answer over the Help book. inkhaven import-typst-help seeds Help with a curated typst reference.
• F7 Grammar check with deterministic correction extraction (g replaces the buffer with just the corrected text, preserving Typst markup).

Storage and backup

• DuckDB metadata + Tantivy full-text + HNSW vectors via bdslib.
• Snapshots: F5 captures the buffer; F6 opens the snapshot history picker.
• inkhaven backup --out <dir> zips the entire project.
• inkhaven restore <archive> --to <dir> puts it back.
• Auto-backup on TUI exit when the last backup is older than backup.max_age (humantime: 7d, 12h, 30m, …) — splash screen with a progress bar.
• Session persistence: cursor position, focus, tree-scroll, open paragraph all survive restarts. Per-paragraph cursor memory: switch around and every paragraph remembers where you were.

CLI tools

• init — set up a fresh project (interactive confirmation if the directory exists).
• add / delete / mv / list — manage the hierarchy from a script.
• search "phrase" — semantic search from the shell.
• reindex — re-walk .typ files into the database.
• export typst / export pdf — produce a single Typst manuscript or a built PDF.
• import-help --documents-directory <dir> — populate the Help book from a directory of markdown / text / typst files (wipes Help first).
• backup / restore — see above.
• ai "prompt" — one-shot inference from the shell (no TUI).

Configuration

A single inkhaven.hjson in each project root drives every knob: embedding model, LLM providers, autosave cadence, sync interval, hierarchy depth, language, snowball stemmers, the full visual theme (per-pane backgrounds and foregrounds, all syntax colours, lexicon highlight colours), key bindings, and backup policy.

Install

Inkhaven ships as a single static binary per platform. Three install paths:

1. cargo binstall (no compile)

If you already have cargo-binstall:

cargo binstall inkhaven

cargo-binstall reads [package.metadata.binstall] from Cargo.toml, picks the right asset off GitHub Releases, and drops the binary into ~/.cargo/bin. Works on Linux (x86_64), macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), and Windows (x86_64).

2. GitHub Releases (direct download)

Grab the tarball for your platform from Releases, unpack, and put inkhaven somewhere on your PATH. Builds are produced by the release.yml workflow on every tag push.

3. cargo install --git (compile from source)

cargo install --git https://github.com/vulogov/blackInkhaven --tag v1.0.0

This works because every dependency (including bdslib and tree-sitter-typst) is vendored under vendor/ — no separate registry fetches, no GitHub auth needed. The first build takes ~10 minutes on a modern laptop because of DuckDB + Tantivy + fastembed compilation; the release binary above is the fast path.

Inkhaven is not published on crates.io. See Cargo.toml's publish = false line and the Documentation/ notes for the rationale.

Quick start

# Build (if installing from source)
cargo build --release

# Initialise a project (asks for confirmation if the directory exists)
./target/release/inkhaven init ~/Books/my-novel

# Build the hierarchy from the CLI…
./target/release/inkhaven --project ~/Books/my-novel add book "My Novel"
./target/release/inkhaven --project ~/Books/my-novel \
    add chapter "The Beginning" --parent my-novel
./target/release/inkhaven --project ~/Books/my-novel \
    add paragraph "Opening Scene" --parent my-novel/the-beginning

# …or skip the CLI and add everything from the TUI
./target/release/inkhaven --project ~/Books/my-novel
# Inside the TUI: B (book), C/V (chapter), A/S (subchapter), +/P (paragraph)

Use cases

• Long-form fiction. Hierarchy fits novels naturally (Book → Part → Chapter → Scene). Places / Characters / Research system books keep worldbuilding next to prose.
• Technical documentation. Each chapter is a .typ file; the tree doubles as a table of contents. Semantic search makes "where did I document the retry policy?" a one-keystroke question.
• Translation work. Multilingual embeddings + per-language Snowball stemmers let you keep source and target in two parallel books.
• Research notebooks. Snapshots track how a draft evolved; the AI pane can summarise a chapter when you come back after a week.
• Help and onboarding writing. Ship docs as a directory and let Inkhaven build a Help book your readers can query through F1.

Documentation

The full docs live under Documentation/.

Start here:

• Documentation/README.md — entry point and table of contents.
• Documentation/FIRST_STEPS.md — compile, install, initialise.
• Documentation/Tutorials/ — narrative walk-throughs, each focused on one workflow.

Reference:

• Documentation/KEYBINDING.md — every keystroke the TUI recognises, organised by pane and overlay.
• Documentation/CONFIGURATION.md — the full HJSON reference.
• Documentation/MAINTENANCE.md — backup, restore, reindex, logs.
• Documentation/PROMPTS.md — the prompt library and the Prompts system book.
• Documentation/LOCATIONS.md — managing Places.
• Documentation/CHARACTERS.md — managing Characters.

Built with

• bdslib — DuckDB + Tantivy + fastembed + HNSW document store
• ratatui, tui-textarea
• tree-sitter + tree-sitter-typst
• genai — provider-neutral LLM streaming
• pulldown-cmark, rust-stemmers, zip, humantime, and many others — see Cargo.toml.

Licence

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.