python-gist 0.1.9

Manage github gists

‘gist’ is a command line interface for working with github gists. It provides several methods for inspecting a users gists, and the ability to easily create them.

Installation

To install ‘gist’ you can either use,

$ sudo pip install python-gist

or,

$ sudo python setup.py install

or,

$ sudo make install

This will install the python package ‘gist’ to the standard location for your system and copy the license, readme, and some bash scripts into /usr/share/gist. The bash scripts contain functions that support tab-completion. Basic tab completion is provided by gist.bash. To enable it, add

source /usr/share/gist/gist.bash

to your .bashrc file. There are two alternative bash scripts available that provide fuzzy matching of gists via tab completion: ‘gist-fzf.bash’ and ‘gist-fzsl.bash’. These scripts assume that the packages ‘fzf’ and ‘fzsl’, respectively, are installed on your system (see Dependencies).

Getting started

‘gist’ requires a personal access token for authentication. To create a token, go to https://github.com/settings/applications and generate a new token. The token needs to then be added to a .gist file in your home directory. The .gist file should take the form,

[gist]
token: <enter token here>
editor: <path to editor>

The editor field is optional. If the default editor is specified through some other mechanism ‘gist’ will try to infer it. Otherwise, you can use the config file to ensure that ‘gist’ uses the editor you want it to use.

Usage

‘gist’ is intended to make it easy to manage and use github gists from the command line. There are several commands available:

gist create  - creates a new gist
gist edit    - edit the files in your gist
gist list    - prints a list of your gists
gist clone   - clones a gist
gist delete  - deletes a gist from github
gist files   - prints a list of the files in a gist
gist archive - downloads a gist and creates a tarball
gist content - prints the content of the gist to stdout
gist info    - prints detailed information about a gist

gist create

Most of the ‘gist’ commands are pretty simple and limited in what they can do. ‘gist create’ is a little different and offers more flexibility in how the user can create the gist.

If you have a set of existing files that you want to turn into a gist,

$ gist create "divide et impera" foo.txt bar.txt

where the quoted string is the description of the gist. Or, you may find it useful to create a gist from content on your clipboard (say, using xclip),

$ xclip -o | gist create "ipsa scientia potestas est"

Another option is to pipe the input into ‘gist create’ and have it automatically put the content on github,

$ echo $(cat) | gist create "credo quia absurdum est"

Finally, you can just call,

$ gist create "a posse ad esse"

which will launch your default editor (defined by the EDITOR environment variable).

gist edit

You can edit your gists directly with the ‘edit’ command. This command will clone the gist to a temporary directory and open up the default editor (defined by the EDITOR environment variable) to edit the files in the gist. When the editor is exited the user is prompted to commit the changes, which are then pushed back to the remote.

gist list

Returns a list of your gists. The gists are returned as,

2b1823252e8433ef8682 - mathematical divagations
a485ee9ddf6828d697be - notes on defenestration
589071c7a02b1823252e + abecedarian pericombobulations

The first column is the gists unique identifier; The second column indicates whether the gist is public (‘+’) or private (‘-‘); The third column is the description in the gist, which may be empty.

gist clone

Clones a gist to the current directory. This command will clone any gist based on its unique identifier (i.e. not just the users) to the current directory.

gist delete

Deletes the specified gist.

gist files

Returns a list of the files in the specified gist.

gist archive

Downloads the specified gist to a temporary directory and adds it to a tarball, which is then moved to the current directory.

gist content

Writes the content of each file in the specified gist to the terminal, e.g.

$ gist content c971fca7997aed65ddc9
foo.txt:
this is foo


bar.txt:
this is bar

For each file in the gist the first line is the name of the file followed by a colon, and then the content of that file is written to the terminal.

gist info

This command provides a complete dump of the information about the gist as a JSON object. It is mostly useful for debugging.

Dependencies

‘gist’ currently depends on,

• requests

• docopts

Optional packages (for fuzzy matching)

• fzf (https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)

• fzsl (https://github.com/jsbronder/fzsl)