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).
Example
👤 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
How to use
- Create a file named something like
contacts.scrollwith 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
theme gazette
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
- Run
scroll build
Done! You should now see a contacts.html file for display and printing as well as TSV, CSV, and JSON files.
Contacts is interoperable with pen and paper.
What do you think? Anything that should be added/removed/improved?
Notes
- The idea for Contacts was sparked by this tweet from Tyler Tringas.