Tersen is a fast, flexible abbreviation engine that compresses text in a human-readable fashion. Abbreviations are entirely user-specifiable through a dictionary of textual mappings (e.g., and becomes &). More concise dictionary files and custom abbreviation behavior can be obtained by writing Lua functions called annotations (which pre-process lines in the abbreviation dictionary) and hooks (which alter tersen's behavior as it abbreviates a text).
Use cases for tersen include:
- Packing more information onto a cheat sheet or reference guide.
- Sending content over SMS or another limited-bandwidth communication channel.
- Obfuscating content so others cannot easily read it but you can.
- Practicing your reading skills in your favorite alphabetic shorthand system.
Tersen is written and extended in Lua. It uses the MIT license. You can install it using LuaRocks: :
$ luarocks install tersenqstart terms-and-concepts dictionary annotations hooks cmdline implementation-details