Prototag

A simple CLI tool to filter and list .md files based on comment headers.

Motivation

After testing multiple sophisticated tools to document small ideas or meetups, I found plain .md files and a flat directory structure to work best for me. I have built this tool to help me search these protocols in the terminal.

The cli tool ptag scans a given directory for .md files and tries to extract a block comment at the start. If this comment includes valid yaml, the file is considered valid. One can specify selectors to further filter all valid files. The list of results is then printed to stdout.

Installation

pip install prototag

Synopsis

Usage: ptag [options] [<dir>]

One can use logical AND and OR conditions to filter the found files with valid headers. AND terms are combined using ',' and OR terms are combined using ':'. OR terms are evaluated before AND terms. The OR conditions are not exclusive.

Select all files, that have both tag1 and tag2.

ptag -t tag1,tag2

Select all files, that have at least one of both tags.

ptag -t tag1:tag2

Select all files, that have either tag1 and tag2 or tag3 or both.

ptag -t tag1,tag2:tag3

Example

Consider the file ~/protocols/example.md:

<!--
author:
  - jan
  - olli
tag:
  - idea
  - python
-->

# Heading

Some text.

One can filter the ~/protocols directory using the cli tool ptag. The following command would return the filename of the above created file.

ptag -t idea,python -a jan ~/protocols

The directory is optional and defaults to the current working directory. This is therefore equivalent to

cd ~/protocols
ptag -t idea,python -a jan