Usability

[Eitot]

Have you considered any simplifications or changes to the workflow? Currently, the minimum input is this:

scour -i /path/to/file.svg -o /path/to/newfile.svg

However, would it not be possible to imply the -i and -o by default? Like this:

scour /path/to/file.svg /path/to/newfile.svg

In addition and/or alternatively, why not make -o optional and automatically write the new file to the same directory, appended with a number, date and/or keyword to the file?

scour /path/to/file.svg

Ideally, I just want to type scour and drag and drop into the CLI. Moreover, I would actually like to see an option for scrubbing multiple files at once.

scour /path/to/file.svg /path/to/file2.svg /path/to/file3.svg

Any thoughts?

[Ede123]

Without having looked at the code and therefore the feasibility of the implementation I'd vote in favor of using "unnamed" command line parameters as input/output file names to save the -i and -o which is default for most command line programs.

I'd not recommend to add a suffix to the input file name in case the user omits an output file name since an "arbitrary" suffix is likely not to match the users requirements.
What we could think about is overwriting the input file if no output file name is specified but this might result in really ugly scenarios of data loss, so maybe we should just stick to the current behavior and require the user to provide a valid output file name.

[Eitot]

I'd not recommend to add a suffix to the input file name in case the user omits an output file name since an "arbitrary" suffix is likely not to match the users requirements.

But it would be better than overwriting the input file, which I cannot recommend, based on my own experience with this program and others. Using an, as you call it, arbitrary suffix would be acceptable when the user does not define an output file name themselves. There could even be a default option for this. I’m just more concerned with easy drag and drop. :)

[Ede123]

This was fixed in 72c2ec8.
Scour still requires you to specify an output file name, otherwise output is written to stdout (so you could pipe or redirect it)

[HEXcube]

I use this bash command to workaround scour's hesitation to overwrite the input file:

for file in *.svg; do scour -i "$file" -o "$file"opt; mv -- "$file"opt "$file"; done

It cleans all the SVG files in current folder (not recursive though) and renames scour's output files to overwrite the original ones. I derived it from this answer on Unix StackExchange: Link to answer. In case if anybody needs it, this is the full command with all the scour options I use:

for file in *.svg; do scour -i "$file" -o "$file"opt --set-precision=5 --renderer-workaround --enable-viewboxing --indent=space --nindent=2 --strip-xml-space --enable-id-stripping --protect-ids-noninkscape; mv -- "$file"opt "$file"; done

[Ede123]

An option to replace the input file is currently tracked in #129.

[HEXcube]

@Ede123 That's good news! 😃

If implemented, would simplify my command into:

for file in *.svg; do scour "$file" --in-place; done