Lipsumator next

In 2015 I made Lipsumator, a customisable placeholder text generator. The project used new (at the time) JavaScript features like generators, so it relies on some tooling that has become pretty out of date.

I still use the lipsumator CLI command occasionally, and I've been intending to modernise the project for a while. Quickly generating placeholder text from your terminal and piping it to the clipboard is really useful.

Deno 1.0 has just been released, and Lipsumator seems like a great way to kick the tires. Deno includes script distribution, bundling, testing, and command line argument parsing tools. Everything I need for the next version of Lipsumator. I want to try it all out and see how it works.

Install

deno install -n lipsumator https://denopkg.com/juice49/lipsumator-next@1.0.0/cli.ts

Run

Generate three paragraphs

lipsumator --unit paragraphs --length 3

Generate three paragraphs with custom phrases

lipsumator --unit paragraphs --length 3 --phrase 'Maranta Leuconeura' --phrase 'Monstera Deliciosa' --phrase 'Urtica Dioica'

Generate ten sentences

lipsumator --unit sentences --length 10

Generate fifty words

lipsumator --unit words --length 50

Command line arguments

Argument	Alias	Default	Description
unit	u	paragraphs	Units of text to generate (words, sentences, or paragraphs).
length	l	1	Quantity of text units to generate (Infinity for fun).
phrase	p		Append a phrase to the phrase list.
unformatted		false	Emit each unit of text without formatting or punctuation.

Future

Lipsumator itself can probably be an independent library that can run in any JS environment (like the browser and serverless functions). For now, I am combining the Deno CLI and the Lipsumator library. Let's split those apart in the future.

Todo

• Figure out Deno dependency lock files.
• Add Deno fmt.
• Add tests.
• Look for a project phrase list in the cwd. Do we need to do anything with Deno permissions to make this work?