Beekeeper

The purpose of Beekeeper is to relieve anxiety by remembering things using a simple command-line interface. Currently, the things it can remember for you are bookmarks to locations of files + directories and aliases of commands. Then you can easily recall your bookmarks or run your aliases by using the label you create for them. The following video illustrates Beekeeper's features:

Installation

You will need Stack a project management tool for the Haskell programming language. Then clone this repository and run the following to install Beekeeper:

stack build
stack install

After installation there is no setup necessary. Beekeeper saves all of it's data to ~/.bk by default. We strive to keep all of Beekeeper's data human readable and not dependent on any heavy external libraries or tools. This is the reason we chose CSV as Beekeeper's underlying data format.

Usage

The following sections give examples of every feature Beekeeper supports.

Adding a bookmark or alias

To add a bookmark use the following command:

bk add bookmark LABEL=TARGET

the string LABEL is the name of the bookmark and its value is TARGET. For example, bk add bookmark math-proj="path/to/math/project" will add a bookmark with label math-proj whose target is path/to/math/project.

Adding an alias is very similar to adding a bookmark:

bk add alias code-proj="code path/to/project"

The labels of bookmarks must begin with an alphabet symbol and then only consist of alphanumeric symbols or underscore or hyphen. Targets are not allowed to be empty.

The main difference between bk add bookmark and bk add alias is that when we ask Beekeeper to run a bookmark its target is output to the terminal, but when we ask Beekeeper to run an alias it will execute its target as a command.

Running a bookmark or alias

To run a bookmark or alias we simply give bk the label of the bookmark:

bk LABEL

Then if LABEL is a bookmark its target is output to the terminal, but if its an alias its target is executed as a command.

The above is the same as bk run LABEL.

Having the bookmark target simply output to the terminal means that we can use it with other commands. For example,

cd `bk LABEL`

will change directory into the target of LABEL. This makes it easy to inject Beekeeper into your workflow on the command line.

Searching for a bookmark or alias

Use:

bk find LABEL

to search for the target whose label is LABEL. A more sophisticated search is underdevelopment.

Removing a bookmark or alias

Use:

bk remove LABEL

to remove a bookmark or alias.

Listing bookmarks

If you run Beekeeper with no arguments at all:

bk

then it will list recent bookmarks. This is the list of all bookmarks and aliases that were created within the last 10 days.

You can list just bookmarks using:

bk bookmarks

and just aliases using:

bk aliases

Use:

bk list

to see a list of all bookmarks and aliases.

Help and version

Use:

bk help

for the help menu and use:

bk version

to show the currently installed version.