See? Look, a tiny explosion: *

boom lets you access text snippets over your command line. I'm personally aiming for exactly two use cases, but I'm almost positive there are thirteen more. Here's a couple examples:

• Your own del.icio.us-esque URL tracker. When I make clever animated gifs of my coworkers, I tend to lose the URL, which is a total bummer since I want to repeatedly repost these images well past their funny expiration date. boom lets me easily access the good stuff for years to come.
• Commonly-used email replies. Everyone's got those stock replies in their pocket for a few common use cases. Rather than keep some files strewn about with the responses, boom gives me them on my ever-present command line.
• Simple todos. You can super-quickly drop items into lists and remove them when finished. I'm a big fan of simple, straightforward stuff. Plus, it's a Dropbox away from simple cloud syncing. Someone get Cultured Code on the line THIS MAY BE RELEVANT TO THEIR INTERESTS!

We store everything in one JSON file in your home directory: ~/.boom. The structure is simple, too. Each individual item is tossed on a list, and you can have multiple lists.

** Overview **

$ boom
gifs (5)
email (4)

** Create a list **

$ boom urls
Boom! Created a new list called "urls".

** Add an item **

# boom <list> <name> <value>
$ boom urls github https://github.com
Boom! "github" in "urls" is "https://github.com". Got it.

** Copy an item's value to your clipboard **

$ boom github
Boom! Just copied https://github.com to your clipboard.

$ boom urls github
Boom! Just copied https://github.com to your clipboard.

** List items in a list **

$ boom urls
blog   http://zachholman.com
github http://github.com

** Delete a list **

$ boom urls delete
You sure you want to delete everything in "urls"? (y/n): y
Boom! Deleted all your urls.

** Delete an item **

# boom urls github delete
Boom! "github" is gone forever.

** List everything **

$ boom all
  enemies
    @kneath:          he's got dreamy eyes. he must die.
    @rtomayko:        i must murder him for his mac and cheese recipe.
    @luckiestmonkey:  she hates recycling.
  urls
    blog:   http://zachholman.com
    github: https://github.com

** Help **

$ boom help

** Manual edit **

If you want to edit the underlying JSON directly, make sure your $EDITOR environment variable is set, and run:

$ boom edit

** It's just the command line, silly **

So don't forget all your other favorites are there to help you, too:

$ boom all | grep @luckiestmonkey
    @luckiestmonkey:  she hates recycling.

gem install boom

Precarious. I'm starting to use this a bunch now, but if you're tossing in important business information (say, a carefully cultivated list of animated .gifs), you'd be sitting pretty if you made a backup of ~/.boom every now and then, just in case. We're living on the edge, baby.

Soon enough, though, this'll be stable to the point where I can truthfully tell myself that this time baby, boom will be, bulletttttttttttttproof ♫.

I'd love to include your contributions, friend. Make sure your methods are TomDoc'd properly, that existing tests pass (rake), and that any new functionality includes appropriate tests. Bonus points if you're not updating the gemspec or bumping boom's version.

All good? Cool! Then send me a pull request!

Zach Holman made this. Ping me on Twitter — @holman — if you're having issues, want me to merge in your pull request, or are using boom in a cool way. I'm kind of hoping this is generic enough that people do some fun things with it. First one to use boom to calculate their tax liability wins.