tilde-launcher

background

As tilde.town has grown over the years, many users have produced interesting, useful, and/or fun tools for the community to use. It goes like this:

• person writes a tool
• person tells people in IRC about it
• people link it from their ~/bin or just call the person's script directly
• someone asks for the tool to be globally linked
• eventually ~vilmibm runs ln -s ~/coolperson/bin/thing /usr/bin/

This works, but new users often ask "what tilde-specific commands can i run?" this is a good and reasonable question and it's hard to answer.

purpose

tilde-launcher serves as a welcome mat to all things tilde.town and executable.

usage

an interaction with tilde-launcher should look something like this:

$ tilde
    Welcome to tilde.town :) this program is your gateway to town-specific
    commands and features. Run tilde help to see the sort of things you can
    do.
$ tilde help
   You can use the following commands with the tilde program:
   
   chat     join the local IRC server
   contrib  run a community command like 'feels'
   help     display this help
   mail     check your tilde.town email
   page     alert ~vilmibm to an emergency
   poetry   generate poetry from cut-up text
   submit   suggest that a program be added to contrib
   toot     post a message to the community mastodon
   tweet    post a message to the community twitter
   wiki     access or update the town wiki

   You can also run:

   tilde help command

   and replace "command" with one of the above commands to get help specific
   to that command.
$ tilde contrib
    This command helps you run various community-maintained programs. If you
    want to see them all, use --list
$ tilde contrib --list
    botany
    feels
    writo
    # truncated for example's sake
$ tilde contrib --bootstrap
    alias botany='tilde contrib botany'
    alias feels='tilde contrib feels'
    alias writo='tilde contrib writo'
    # truncated for example's sake
    # For backwards compatability when included in ~/.bashrc as `source $(tilde contrib --bootstrap)`
$ tilde contrib botany
    # ...runs botany
$ vim cool_program
$ tilde submit cool_program
   You've submitted cool_program to ~vilmibm for review! check your tildemail
   in a few days for an update.

project goals

• As thin as possible. No actual logic should be run here.
• Easy to add to. Commands should be made available with symlinking.
• Beginner friendly. Shouldn't use any words that go undefined or aren't self-evident for a newcomer to Unix/Linux.

Open questions

0. Should this be implemented in a shell script? Or something higher level?
1. Does this obsolete tildetown-scripts should it?
2. Should this eventually expose the admin functions afforded by tildetown-admin?