I think I’ve settled on a name for the project I’ve been calling “awstools”. “Settled” is probably a good word for it: I came up with it about a week ago, and dismissed it at first as being pretty ordinary¹. But over that time, it’s been slowly growing on me. Also, I’ve yet to come up with any alternatives that are better.

Anyway, the name that I’ve settled on is the Audax Toolset.

It’s not a great name. Honestly, anyone with more creativity that me could probably come up with a bunch of names better than this. I’m going to play the name-is-the-thing-you-say-to-talk-about-the-thing here.

But the name was not completely random. “Audax” was chosen from the second part of the Latin name for a wedged-tail eagle: Aquila audax. Translated from Latin it means bold, and although I would definitely not describe this project as in any way “bold”, it is a TUI based application which, given the limited palette for building UIs, may have some instances of bold font. But what I’m trying to invoke with this name is the sense of an eagle flying in a cloudless sky. Cloudless → cloudy → the Cloud → AWS (yeah, like I said it’s not a great name).

Anyway, it’s good enough for the moment. And the domain name audax.tools was available, which was a good thing. Right now, the domain doesn’t point to anything but it will eventually point to the website and user guide.

Speaking of which, the user guide is still slowly coming along. I got a very rough draft of the actual guide itself finished. I’ll need to proofread it and flesh it out a little, and also add some screenshots. The reference, which will list all the commands and key bindings (there isn’t many of them), needs to be written as well, but that’s probably the easiest thing to write. I will admit that the guide itself makes for pretty dry reading, and I’m not entirely convinced it would be enough for someone coming in cold to download up the tools and start using them. I may also need to write some form of tutorial, or maybe even record a demo video. Something to consider once I’ve got the rest of the site finished, I guess.

Worked a little more on “awstools” (still haven’t thought of a good alternative name for it). I think the “dynamo-browse” tool is close to being in a releasable state. I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to clean up most of the inconsistencies, and making sure that it’s being packaged correctly.

Now it’s documentation writing time. I’m working my way through a very basic website and user guide. It’s been a little while since I’ve written any form of user-level documentation — most of the documents I write have been for other developers I work closely with — and I admit that it feels like a bit of a slog. It might be the tone of writing that I’ve adopted: a little dry and impersonal, trying to walk that fine line between being informative without swamping the reader with big blocks of words. I might need to work on that: no real reason why the documentation needs to be boring to the reader.

The website itself will be a statically generated site using Hugo and will most likely be served using GitHub pages. I’ve settled on the terminal theme, since “awstools” is a suite of terminal-based apps. That reasoning might be a little corny, but to be honest, I have grown to actually like the theme itself. I haven’t settled on a domain for it yet.

While working on the documentation, I ran into a useful website that contains a comprehensive list of HTML entities, complete with previews. Good reference for the arrows glyphs I need to use to represent key bindings in the document.

A little more work on “awstools” today, mainly on a bit of a cleanup spree to make them suitable for others to use. This generally means fixing up any inconsistencies in how the commands work. An example of this is the put command, which now writes all modified items that are marked to the table (or if there are no marked items, all modified items) instead of just the selected one. This brings it closer to how the delete command works.

Also merged the set-s and set-n commands into a single set-attr command, which now has the ability to specify an optional attribute type along with the attribute name. This still only works with the currently selected item, and I think I’ll keep it like that for the moment. I do want something to modify attributes of all marked items (or even all items), but it might be better if that was a separate command, as it may allow for some potentially useful actions like adding a suffix to the value instead of simply changing it.

Some of these command names are a bit unwieldy, like set-attr, but I’m hopeful to replace many of these with simple keystrokes down the line. I’m trying not to reserve many generic names like “set” in the off chance of adding something like TCL or similar to make simple scripts (this is in addition to something closer to JavaScript for more feature-full extensions). Nothing settled here, but trying to keep that option open.