lepiter-cli: a terminal editor for lepiter knowledge bases

lepiter is the notebook and knowledge base system behind glamorous toolkit. it stores pages as json files on disk—which means you can read them without the gt environment. lepiter-cli does exactly that: a terminal tool for browsing, searching, and editing lepiter knowledge bases.

quick start

# browse interactively
lepiter-cli tui ./my-knowledge-base

# list all pages
lepiter-cli list ./my-knowledge-base

# search
lepiter-cli search "pharo" ./my-knowledge-base --full-text

# render a page to stdout
lepiter-cli show "Page Title" ./my-knowledge-base

the tui gives you a searchable page list, full-screen page reading with markdown-like rendering, and link navigation. tab cycles through links on a page, enter follows them, h goes back.

editing

press e in page view to enter the editor. it works at the snippet level—text and code snippets are editable, everything else stays read-only. changes are auto-saved after a short idle period and written back to the page json file. ctrl+u undoes, tab moves between snippets.

plugins

lepiter’s schema has many snippet types, and new ones appear over time. lepiter-cli handles unknown types via external plugins: long-lived processes that receive snippet json over stdin and return rendered lines over stdout.

{
  "plugins": [
    { "name": "wardley", "types": ["wardleyMap"] }
  ]
}

the plugin binary is resolved from PATH by convention (lepiter-plugin-<name>), and lepiter-core exports a small sdk with a lepiter_plugin_main! macro to cut the boilerplate. render output is cached by snippet hash.

structure

two crates:

• lepiter-core: parser, metadata index, plugin sdk, and plain text renderer. lazy loading—metadata is indexed on open, full pages parsed on demand.
• lepiter-cli (lepiter-tui/): the tui, editor, and all cli subcommands.

resilience

lepiter’s schema evolves. lepiter-core handles unknown snippet types by preserving them as Node::Unknown with their raw json, so new snippet types don’t crash the tool—they just render as a fallback, or get routed to a plugin if one is configured¹. non-fatal parse issues are collected separately and don’t abort indexing.