Hey folks, I just wanted to share a quick script I threw together called notational ls. One of the big problems of any code base (or any filesystem) is that it's hard to tell what's what - folder and file names often trade brevity for clarity.

So I thought about a version of `ls` that works like this:

  > nls
    web: Where python web server files are stored
    ad_hoc: One time scripts 
    ios: Our IOS code
    images

Adding descriptions is really easy too:

  > nls images Images SHARED between both ios and web
    web: Where python web server files are stored
    ad_hoc: One time scripts 
    ios: Our IOS code
    images: Images SHARED between both ios and web

So I whipped up said script in python and pushed it to github for all to use. Code is at https://github.com/newhouseb/nls, feel free to fork as you so please, but I must get back to real work. If there's enough interest it'd be great to turn this into a larger effort of improving the small things in our bash lives. If you're lazy, here's the source anyway (github has comments and sane spacing) - enjoy!

  from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
  import sys
  files = Popen(["ls"], stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0].splitlines()
  notes = {}
  try:  
      nls_file = open('.nls').read().splitlines()
  except IOError:
      nls_file = []
  for entry in nls_file:
      file, note = entry.split(':', 1)
      notes[file] = note
  if len(sys.argv) > 1:
      if len(sys.argv) == 2 and sys.argv[1] == 'bootstrap':
          for file in files:
              if file not in notes:
                  notes[file] = ''
      elif sys.argv[1] in files:
          notes[sys.argv[1]] = ' '.join(sys.argv[2:])
      open('.nls','w').write(
          '\n'.join([file+': '+note for file,note in notes.iteritems()]))
  for file in files:
      if file in notes:
          print '\033[1m' + file + ':\033[0m ' + notes[file].strip()
      else:
          print '\033[1m' + file + '\033[0m'

Note: I know this code isn't perfect, but it was a quick job and is what came to mind first and, most importantly, works. If you want to improve it send me a pull request/fork it on github (this is REALLY easy now with github's recent updates).