TylerandClaude Fable 5
c1ccb5739b
Phase 1 of the improvement plan (PR 4 of the sequence): stop concurrent
whole-object saves from losing edits, stop failed saves from reporting clean,
and stop corrupt user data from silently vanishing.
Revisions (core/schema.js, core/store.js):
- Every guide and step carries a monotonic `revision`, bumped on each store
write. Legacy v1 data without the field reads as revision 0 and upgrades on
its next save — no migration pass, no data rewrite.
- saveGuide/saveStep accept { expectedRevision } for compare-and-swap saves;
a mismatch throws RevisionConflictError instead of clobbering. Direct user
edits pass no expectation (the user is the authority); background writers
must pass one.
Stale AI responses (app/text-intel.js):
- generateStepPatch snapshots the step revision before the (slow) model call,
re-reads the step after it, and saves with the original expectedRevision. A
user edit made during generation now surfaces as "the step changed while AI
was generating; nothing was overwritten" — previously the AI response
silently overwrote the newer edit.
Autosave truthfulness (app/renderer/editor.js):
- flushStep/flushGuide cleared the dirty flag BEFORE awaiting the IPC save,
so a rejected save (invoked via a debounce that never handled rejections)
lost the visible dirty state. The flag is now cleared only after a durable
save; failures keep it dirty, surface a persistent saveError in editor
meta, toast the user, and retry on the next edit or explicit save.
- Navigating away from the editor flushes pending debounced saves so the
last edit can never be dropped by a view switch.
Corruption quarantine (core/store.js):
- listGuides/listSteps used to silently skip unreadable entries — a corrupt
guide just vanished from the library. Corrupt guide/step directories are
now moved to library/quarantine (original bytes preserved) and recorded in
a recovery report (store.getRecoveryReport()) for the UI. Empty in-progress
directories are still skipped quietly — absence of guide.json is not
corruption.
Tests: revision increments, stale-CAS rejection with user edit surviving,
CAS success path, guide CAS, v1 no-revision upgrade, guide/step quarantine
with preserved bytes + recovery report, empty-dir non-quarantine, AI
stale-write rejection end-to-end (user edit mid-generation survives) and the
clean-apply path. 240 unit tests pass; startup smoke and sample-artifact
E2E pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
StepForge
StepForge is a local-first, open-source desktop app for Windows, with Linux (WIP) builds. It captures step-by-step workflows as screenshots, lets you annotate and describe each step in a focused three-pane editor, and exports the result to Markdown, DOCX, PPTX, PDF, HTML (WIP), GIF (WIP), confluence (WIP), Wiki.js (WIP), and image bundles (WIP). The current reconmendations for exporting is Markdown and PDF.
It is an independent desktop guide-capture tool inspired by publicly documented workflow patterns of commercial documentation tools like Folge. It contains no third-party branding, assets, or code from those tools.
Network and privacy contract. StepForge has no telemetry, no update checks, no license checks, and no cloud. Guides never leave your machine on their own. The only outbound network feature is the optional AI integration: when you enable it and configure an Ollama endpoint, StepForge sends step screenshots and text to that endpoint to generate titles and descriptions. By default that endpoint must be local (loopback); sending data to a remote host requires the explicit "Allow remote AI host" opt-in. See docs/PRIVACY.md for exactly what is collected and sent. Note that OCR (Tesseract) and its English language data are bundled production dependencies — Electron is not the only one.
Overview
The core workflow:
- Capture — take full-screen, active-window, or region screenshots with configurable delay, pause/resume, and global hotkeys; or import images and paste from the clipboard.
- Annotate — rectangles, ovals, lines, arrows, text, tooltips, numbered markers, blur, highlight, magnify, and crop on a resolution-independent annotation scene graph.
- Describe — rich-text titles and descriptions, informational text blocks, code blocks, tables, step links, and placeholders.
- Export — every exporter renders from the same normalized Render AST, so output is deterministic across formats.
What's Included
- Guide library with folders, favorites, title search, full-text search,
duplicate/move/delete, and a quick-actions palette (
Ctrl+/). - Capture engine — the editor's Capture ▾ button offers full screen, active window, and region capture (the app hides itself during the shot), plus continuous capture sessions that grab a step on every click where the OS allows it, or on a 3/5/10 s auto-interval everywhere else. The REC bar shows the live count and the start/pause control. Delay, global hotkeys, click markers, clipboard paste, and PNG/JPEG/GIF import included. The full keyboard shortcut list lives under More ▾ → Keyboard shortcuts in the editor.
- Three-pane editor — step tree with substeps, statuses (todo/in-progress/done), hidden/skipped steps, focused view (zoom/pan that never mutates the original image), autosave, and command-stack undo/redo.
- Annotation canvas — normalized JSON scene graph with resolution-independent coordinates; annotations render identically in the editor and in every exporter.
- Sharing & backups — single-file
.sfgzarchives (zip-based, path- traversal validated), linked guides with.lock-sfgzlock files and explicit save, plus automated snapshot backups and restore. - Exports — JSON, Markdown, Simple HTML, Rich HTML (checkboxes + floating
TOC), PDF, animated GIF, image bundle, DOCX, and PPTX, with per-format
export templates shareable as
.sfgltfiles. - Settings & theming — system/light/dark themes, capture options, keyboard shortcuts, preview step count.
Everything except the Electron shell is dependency-free Node.js: the ZIP, PNG, GIF, PDF, DOCX, and PPTX writers are all implemented in this repository using only Node built-ins.
Getting Started
For a Windows installation, see docs/windows_installation or for a developer/more in depth walkthrough, see docs/GETTING_STARTED.md.
On Linux (⚠️ work in progress — X11 vs Wayland, enabling per-click capture, the screen-share prompt), see docs/GETTING_STARTED_WITH_LINUX.md.
Requirements: Node.js 22.12+ and npm (pinned in .nvmrc; installs are
refused on older Nodes because the packaging toolchain needs 22.12+).
npm ci # one-time, installs the locked dependency tree
npm start # launch StepForge
Dependencies are only ever installed by you, via npm ci — the app never
downloads or repairs packages at runtime.
First run creates the local data directory (~/.local/share/stepforge on
Linux (WIP), %APPDATA%/stepforge on Windows; override with
STEPFORGE_DATA_DIR).
Testing
Please create your tests so that when the following is ran it automatically tests your test.
bash tests/run_test.sh
The runner executes every tests/checks/test_*.sh script; those scripts run
the workflow test suites under tests/unit/ with node --test. The tests
exercise real workflows like creating guides, round-tripping archives, exporting
documents, and validating the bytes of the output, not string matching.
Building & Packaging
bash scripts/bootstrap-offline.sh # verify toolchain availability
bash scripts/verify.sh # full test suite + smoke checks
bash scripts/build-release.sh # assemble runnable app directory
bash scripts/package-linux.sh # local Linux packaging (WIP; not part of release)
npm run package:windows # Windows installer .exe in releases/
pwsh scripts/package-windows.ps1 # same Windows installer build via PowerShell
See build/build_report.md for what was produced on this machine and which packaging tools were unavailable.
Offline Guarantee
The shipping app makes zero network calls. There is no telemetry, no update check, no license validation, no cloud sync, no account system, and no remote AI. Exports embed no remote fonts or CDN references. See docs/SECURITY.md for the threat model.
Contributing
See docs/CONTRIBUTING.md for the full contribution flow, including the issue-number requirement for every pull request and the clean-room rules.
Repository Layout
Project docs live in docs/ and prompt handoffs live in ai_prompts/.
See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the repo layout.
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
Basically, do whatever you want with it just don't make money off it or sell it.