prose

Prose

A CLI for managing prosefiles.

Introduction

prose is a command line interface for updating and managing a "prosefile" - a file which stores written word entries with a timestamp, ID and optional title and author.

A prosefile looks like:

{
  "filetype": "prosefile",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "entries": [
    {
      "title": "My entry",
      "body": "Hello, prose! This is an entry in my prosefile.\n\nI will later publish this somewhere!",
      "id": "f0abfc1e-5fb8-40b7-b78b-0b756ba0d509",
      "author": "Michael",
      "time": "2020-05-12T15:45:19.621931532-04:00",
      "metadata": {}
    }
  ]
}

By default, prose assumes your prosefile exists at ~/prosefile.json, but you can configure it to work with a different location, or with multiple files by using the --file flag, or configuring file in your configuration.

The prose configuration file lives at ~/.prose.yaml and can also be configured using the --config flag when using prose.

Example Config

author: Michael
file: /home/michael/snippets.json
pretty: true

Sending

The main purpose of a prosefile is to store your written entries for other programs to consume, modify and render. Consider a program called prose-to-md which reads a prosefile from stdin and outputs each entry rendered as markdown, with the entry title as the first level header:

$ prose send | prose-to-md
# My Entry

Hello, prose! This is an entry in my prosefile.

I will later publish this somewhere!
$ ...

prose-to-md is referred to as a "prose renderer", as it takes a prosefile shaped input and creates a rendered output.

Now, consider a program called prose-add-date which reads a prosefile from stdin, modifies each entry's body by prepending a human readable date, then outputs back to stdout. We could then pipe that into prose-to-md for greater effect:

$ prose send | prose-add-date | prose-to-md
# My Entry

May 12th, 2020

Hello, prose! This is an entry in my prosefile.

I will later publish this somewhere!

prose-add-date is referred to as a "prose modifier", as it takes a prosefile shaped input, modifies it, then outputs a prosefile.

As you can imagine, you can continue to chain modifiers to greater benefit before ultimately piping to a renderer. Perhaps you want to inject author bylines before rendering to static html, or you want to modify all pronouns to be ungendered before automating a publish to a web service:

$ prose send | prose-inject-byline | prose-to-html > my-website.html
$ prose send | prose-degender | prose-writeas-submit