ruut-ruby

This project is no longer maintained. Check out the rewrite in Rust.

Why

I deal with folder structures a lot for work at @DocSend. I also love the output of tree(1) for talking about folder structures.

Unfortunately, most of the time I'm not talking about folder structures on my file-system, so in order to get the pretty output with tree(1), I would have to create the directories and/or files on my computer, which seems a bit ridiculous.

That's why I created ruut. It takes a fairly easy-to-type expression like this:

Parent (Child 1, Child 2 (Grandchild 1, Grandchild 2), Child 3)

and turns it into something pretty like

Parent
├── Child 1
├── Child 2
│   ├── Grandchild 1
│   └── Grandchild 2
└── Child 3

Usage

ruut can either take the "structure" from stdin or as an argument:

$ ruut 'Parent (Child 1, Child 2 (Grandchild 1, Grandchild 2), Child 3)'
# Equivalent to
$ echo 'Parent (Child 1, Child 2 (Grandchild 1, Grandchild 2), Child 3)' | ruut

Installation

It's just a Ruby script, so all you need to do is the following:

1. Make sure Ruby is installed
2. Put it in a directory that's in your $PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin/)
3. Allow yourself to execute it (e.g. chmod u+x /where/you/put/ruut)

Syntax

The "structure" should abide by the following syntax. Surrounding <,> means you fill in those values yourself. Surrounding [,] means that part is optional.

<name of folder> [(<name of subfolder 1> [(<name of subsubfolder1>[, <name of
subsubfolder2>[, ...]])][, <name of subfolder 2> [, ...]])]

It's much easier to see through examples:

Parent (Child 1, Child 2 (Grandchild 1, Grandchild 2), Child 3 (Grandchild 3))

yields

Parent
├── Child 1
├── Child 2
│   ├── Grandchild 1
│   └── Grandchild 2
└── Child 3
    └── Grandchild 3

Note that whitespace in the middle of a folder name is preserved.