31 Native Workspace

[dendron-bot]

Goals

Be able to use Dendron without initializing a code workspace. These will be henceforth referred to as [[Native Workspaces|dendron.rfc.31-native-workspace#native-workspace]].

Context

Currently, Dendron only works if you open Dendron to a dendron.code-workspace folder.

This causes the following issues and limitations:

• new users are often confused when they open up a Dendron folder but are unable to make use of Dendron functionality because they haven't opened into the workspace
• users have to have a dedicated VSCode workspace open for Dendron and are unable to make use of Dendron inside their existing projects
• this is a tight coupling between VSCode and Dendron and makes it harder to build alternative clients and frontends for Dendron

Proposal

Instead of relying on dendron.code.workspace, have the presence of a dendron.yml file be enough for Dendron to instantiate a workspace.

Details

The startup process is described [[here|dendron://dendron.dendron-site/pkg.dendron-plugin.arch.startup#summary]].

On startup, Dendron will look at all workspace folders and look for the presence of dendron.yml

Implementation

Part of this work has already been done and is described [[here|dendron.dev.changelog]].

Remaining work:

• currently an error on initialization with where workspaceFile is undefined
• we have watcher functions (eg. fileWatcher) that rely on the VSCode implementation of a filewatcher in order to update files
  • these watchers generally don't work outside of a Code Workspace which means we'll need to add our own watcher (eg. GitHub - paulmillr/chokidar: Minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library)
• remove flag that currently gates [[Native Workspace|dendron://site/dendron.rfc.31-native-workspace#native-workspace]] to only activate in dev mode
• achieve feature parity between code workspace and native workspace
• update plugin tests to be able to test in code workspace
  • NOTE: this will be a big undertaking, recommend doing this incrementally
    • initially, create a test harness that can easily run native workspace test
    • slowly migrate existing tests to new test harness on a week by week/just in time basis
  • should be written according to BDD style

  suite("GIVEN Native Wowkrspace", () => {
      describe("WHEN initialized with a single vault", () => {
          describe("AND WHEN a link is copied", () => {
              test("THEN return the copied link", () => {
                  runWithWorkspace({type: NATIVE,  ..., onInit: () => {
  
                  }});
              });
          });
      });
  });

Concepts

Native Workspace

A vault that is initialized from dendron.yml instead of dendron.code-workspace

Code Workspace

A vault that is initialized from dendron.code-workspace

[RoyiAvital]

Having a flat layout (Or at least supporting it) would be great.
I'd like a layout which is:

- MyProjectName
    - Note001.md
    - Note002.md
    - Note003.md
    - DendronConfFile001
    - DendronConfFile002
    - DendronConfFile003

Namely, I want to avoid the notes sub folder. I want everything to be flat on the high level folder.
This layout is more generic.