Enjoying my first few days using Causality (which fits so well into many writing process approaches I've been coaching myself on, from Lajos Egri to Lisa Cron) mainly for a Novel I'm engaging with fully at this time. The experience is amazing, thanks for such great well user and writing process thought out software!!!
Got a million questions on Input/Output and, in general, novel writing process workflow with Causality, but I'm holding off until I've used it for a few weeks and developed my own based on the features I see and read about in the docs. (For example, I was worried about how to sync with Scrivener, but with Research, Timeline, easy straightforward to plain text (very important to me) and Word, I'm realizing that I won't be using Scrivener much more if at all, and that Causality will be my single source of truth (with plain text project files, I'm pushing important milestones to a GitHub repo, great way to backup for me at least!)
So, I'm switching between Linux and Mac (depends on whether I'm standing (Linux) or resting in my recliner (Mac) and both work fine.
I use Linux a lot, and I'm a little concerned. I notice:
Some documentation is missing for Linux (i.e. [Automatic Backups](https://caudocs.hollywoodcamerawork.com/input-output/auto-save) but doesn't often happen
The Linux (AppImage) version (3.2.5) seems to be one behind the Mac version (3.2.9).
Even though the experience is practically identical and I have encountered no problems on Linux whatsoever, I just want to confirm that Linux will continue to be on the roadmap.
Again, thanks for the great software!
Hi,
Great! Yes, Dropbox is a better way to "share", because it does whole files. And Dropbox also has versioning for emergencies.
The path you mention is just the QML cache. The UI in Causality is written in a language called QML, which is compiled to .qmlc files just in time.
The directory you're looking for is:
~/.local/share/Hollywood Camera Work/Causality
I'll update the docs.
Hi,
The Linux version is temporarily slightly behind. This is mainly because we're not supposed to be releasing at all right now (major refactor in progress), but we did some quick things to solve specific production problems for basically one production. They were releasable, but we have to keep back-porting such changes to the real new master branch.
The old Linux build machine is also being replaced, and since we're not in a proper release cycle right now, it wasn't urgent to get it up quickly. Since it would only affect a few people, we allowed the Linux version to fall behind for a month or two. But generally releases on all platforms are simultaneous, especially going forward.
The auto-save instructions might be missing for Linux, but rest assured that we're using standard directories on every platform, and it definitely does exist somewhere. I have to find out where the app data directory is on Linux and add this to the instructions. But every directory we write to exists in some form on all platforms.
Regarding committing to Git, be aware that this data is not mergeable. Your document will likely crash the first time you merge where there's any change in the linking between objects. I also don't know if the order the objects are written to JSON is deterministic, and this could also make a merge impossible. But this is a graph database, and text-merge is an incompatible tool.
The cause of our massive development downtime is that we're preparing for sync and collaboration, which is the #1 feature request. This will run through our servers, and will effectively be like a real-time Git. We keep infinite history of all text so that we can do the equivalent of Diff and Blame, and show who did what. So your reason for committing to Git might go away.