A simple snippet manager for Unix-based systems.

gsnip lets you find, insert, delete and list out all snippets stored in a text file. The syntax rules for writing snippets are simple and straightforward. The idea is to keep this program as simple as possible: what it does is it sources a file with snippets and offers an interface to interact with it.

See Usage section below to see how to use gsnip. Source code documentation is available here: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/mdm-code/gsnip.

Usage

There are two parts of the workflow: one, gsnipd, a server running on Unix Domain Socket, handling connections, and gsnip, which is the client that relies on FD0 or SDTIN and simple sub-commands to send messages to the server.

gsnipd, gsnip and all its subcommands print out useful information with -h|--help.

First, you want to spin up the server with either of these commands:

gsnipd
gsnipd &>/dev/null &

The first one will write STDERR to the terminal so that you can see server messages. The other one sends all messages to /dev/null and gets detached from the current session.

You can also enable it as a daemon in systemd or launchd on MacOS so that it runs on startup, and you don't have to mess around with it each time you restart your computer.

The name of the source file used to store snippets can be passed as an argument to the gsnipd program. If it isn't, the program will search for a snippets file at the gsnip subdirectory in XDG data directories. It will error out if it could not find one.

Then you can interact with the server using gsnip client like this:

echo [snip-name ...] | gsnip find
echo [snip-name ...] | gsnip delete
gsnip list
gsnip insert
gsnip reload

You can query the server with find for any snippet stored in the source file. Alternatively, you can ask the server to list out all available snippets. You can delete existing snippets with delete subcommand. You can also insert new snippets through an editor or STDIN.

In order to add a new snippet right from the command line, the easy way would be to use here documents like this, for instance:

gsnip insert << EOF
startsnip test "this is just a test snippet"
func test() bool {
	return true
}
endsnip
EOF

You can reload the source snippet file at the server runtime by calling the gsnip client with the reaload subcommand, which is the equivalent of sending SIGHUP to the process using kill -1 [pid]. The latter is annoying because you have to find the process id with ps before sending the signal. Another way would be to write PID to a known file that the client could access.

The idea was to use gsnip as an application agnostic tool. Since it operates on standard file descriptors, it can be used in most Unix pipes and most importantly vim through the use of ! inside the editor. I do not like other editors all that much.

Syntax

The snippet syntax looks like this:

startsnip NAME "COMMENT"
BODY
endsnip

startsnip and endsnip delimit the scope of a single snippet. They are used by the parser to identify the start and the end. There few more rules that have to be respected:

1. NAME could be anything so long as it does not contain any white space characters.
2. NAME must not be a reserved gsnip command (e.g., @LST would list out all the snippets found in the file).
3. COMMENT should always be enclosed in double quotes.
4. Finally, BODY can be pretty much anything.

Installation

go install github.com/mdm-code/gsnip/cmd/{gsnip,gsnipd}@latest

If you want to build it from source, consult Makefile; there is an install directive that you can call with make install, and that's pretty much it when it comes to the installation of this program. Make sure that the directory where it's installed is on your $PATH. You can move, copy or symlink the binaries anywhere on the $PATH.

Development

Have a look at Makefile to see how to run the standard code linting and testing works.

Don't forget to install golint before you run the test command from the Makefile:

go install golang.org/x/lint/golint@latest

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Michał Adamczyk.

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL 3 license. See LICENSE for more details.