cmddocs 0.10.6

An interactive commandline interface for your personal docs using python, Cmd, git and markdown

cmddocs is an interactive commandline wiki-like python script. It lets you easily maintain your wiki/docs/cheetsheets using:

• Python

• cmd module (for CLI)

• git for version control

• markdown for writing and viewing

• oldschool files and directories in your $HOME

Why ?

I kind of started cmddocs because I couldn’t find something like this on the internet. Here’s my usecase. Im working as a DevOps guy being in touch with various types of software, languages, tools, operating systems and databases. To remember all those things I need a place to store commands, workflows and short howtos.

Most of the software I use (and love) runs on a OpenBSD Box on the internet and are commandline-based. These are mutt, taskwarrior, jrnl, weechat and so on…But i was missing a tool for documentation.

I was using gitit also for a long time, but I found that its way too bloated for my needs. Compiling ghc and gitit was awful, too. After switching to just plaintext files using my vim and git it was also a bit annoying. So I wrote cmddocs to make it easier for me to handle my plaintext files.

Demo

To give you an idea what it looks/feels like I created a short terminal recording.

asciinema cmddocs demo

Installation and usage

Installation

pip install cmddocs

Also make sure you have tree installed.

Create .cmddocsrc file in your $HOME with the following content (adjust to your needs):

[General]
Datadir = /home/noqqe/Docs
Default_Commit_Message = small changes
Excludedir = .git/
Editor = /usr/local/bin/vim
Pager = /usr/bin/less
Prompt = cmddocs>
Promptcolor = 37
Intro_Message = cmddocs - press ? for help

The only required option is “Datadir”, everything else will be guessed or defaults to a sane default value. Once you start cmddocs.py the CLI will be shown. Use help for commands.

$ ./cmddocs.py
Welcome to cmddocs
cmddocs> help

Documented commands (type help <topic>):
========================================
EOF  d       dirs  edit  help  list  ls    mv   rm      status
cd   delete  e     exit  l     log   move  pwd  search  view

cmddocs> help l
Show files in current working dir

Exit cmddocs.py

• CTRL+D

• exit

Correctness, feature-completeness and other weaknesses

Since I’m not a programmer and new to python there are serveral weaknesses.

• tree view for ls command is still produced by calling the external tool tree.

• markdown to ANSI Colors for view command is produced by RegEx matching on markdown format. Longterm goal is to replace it with pythons markdown module using etree function.

• At some point there will may be a pip package for it

If you like, please help me improving.