Views are yours to make

Liquid View ships with several ways of seeing a community’s documents — Connections, Authors, Hot Paragraphs, Health. These are not features of the app. They are view modules: single Swift files, and the app treats your view exactly as it treats ours.

This follows Doug Engelbart’s NLS, where a document could be seen through many view specifications without changing the document. The documents in your community folder are plain, self-describing text. The views multiply. When someone in your community thinks of a new way of looking — a reading-order timeline, a disagreement map, a view for teaching — they can build it and hand it to everyone else as one file.

Writing a view

A view module is a SwiftUI view plus a short declaration. Three steps:

1. Write your view in one file. The library comes to you through the environment: the document index, every link and backlink, and ready-made derivations (citation counts, author relationships, revision chains). Navigation is the same three calls every built-in view uses — open a document, open it at a paragraph, open two documents side by side with visible connections. Your view has no privileged access and needs none: whatever it can do, the built-in views do the same way.
2. Declare the module at the bottom of the file — an id, a sidebar name, an icon, and how to build its panes.
3. Register it — one line in the registry. Sidebar entry, selection, and routing follow automatically.

import SwiftUI

/// My View: <what it shows, and the cognitive job it does>.
struct MyCommunityView: View {
    @Environment(AppModel.self) private var model

    var body: some View {
        List {
            ForEach(model.index.timeline) { entry in
                Button {
                    model.openInLibrary(entry.doc)
                } label: {
                    Text(entry.doc.title)
                }
                .buttonStyle(.plain)
            }
        }
        .navigationTitle("My View")
    }
}

extension MyCommunityView {
    @MainActor static let module = LibraryViewModule(
        id: "my-view",
        name: "My View",
        systemImage: "sparkles",
        makeContent: { AnyView(MyCommunityView()) }
    )
}

A starter version of this template is one click away in the app: Settings → View Modules → Copy Starter Module.

Sharing a view

Send the file. Installing is dropping it into the project and adding its registry line — views are ordinary source code in the open repository, which means every view anyone runs is code anyone can read. Contribute yours by pull request, and it ships to the whole community in the next build.

One request

When you propose a view, say what cognitive work it does — what it helps a person notice, remember, or compare. “It would look good” is not a reason; “it lets you see who is disagreeing with whom across a month” is.