July 16, 2024 — Imagine a single plain text file named contacts.scroll where you stored the contact info for your family, friends, and colleagues, and you could track changes with git, compile it to a beautiful PDF or HTML page with search and sort, and it would also compile to CSV and/or JSON for import into iPhone, Android, Gmail, Outlook, et cetera?

Also imagine that this tool is free, open source, and public domain.

Introducing Contacts, a microlanguage (currently 23 lines of code, including comments) that makes it as concise as possible to add, prune, display, print and export your contacts.

There's almost nothing to learn (the code is self-explanatory).

In fact, it's almost guaranteed that using Contacts you will need to write less (we've taken every unnecessary character out).

👤 Jack Doe phone +1 (555) 123-4567 email john.doe@example.com birthday 2/23/84 notes Daughter - Samantha. 👤 Jill Smith phone +1 (555) 123-4562 email jill@gmail.com birthday 1/23/80

1. Create a file named something like contacts.scroll with this content:

// You can import the file, or just copy/paste the 21 lines of code here. [pathToScroll]/microlangs/contacts.parser title My Contacts buildConcepts contacts.csv contacts.json contacts.tsv buildHtml gazetteCss mediumColumns 1 printTitle table printTable tableSearch 👤 Jack Doe phone +1 (555) 123-4567 email john.doe@example.com birthday 2/23/84 notes Daughter - Samantha. 👤 Jill Smith phone +1 (555) 123-4562 email jill@gmail.com birthday 1/23/80

1. Run scroll build

Done! You should now see a contacts.html file for display and printing as well as TSV, CSV, and JSON files.

What do you think? Anything that should be added/removed/improved?