Very much a WIP project

squirrel is a command line program that tracks you writing progress and gives you useful information and cute pictures of squirrels.

Squirrel's design was inspired by git's design (from a user perspective at least). To start a project, you have to initialize a new project in your directory of choice which will create a .squirrel folder structure in your directory similar to .git directories. And that folder will hold information about the project in general and the word counts. However squirrel is not a static program otherwise we wouldn't be able to track progress without explicit input of the user. That's why we need to have a watch command that will listen to any changes and update the appropriate information.

As many writing project use many file formats and programs, squirrel has a plugin architecture to have many ways to count words. Which plugin will used depends on the project-type field. Here are the plugins available now:

• text
• texcount

hmm, haven't found your project type? you can write Python code? Please make a pull request :)

Tested Python versions:

• python 3.9
• python 3.10

Python versions:

All pip dependencies are in the Pipfile file.

You can install squirrel with pip

pip install squirrel-writer

Grab the repo, install dependencies, and voila.

git clone https://github.com/squirrel-writer/squirrel
cd squirrel
pipenv install --dev && pipenv shell
# Install the package in editable mode
# use pip with this command, so that Pipfile doesn't get modified
pip install -e .

# To run unittests
pytest
# Or use tox to run tests on multiple versions
tox

There 4 main verbs to interact with squirrel:

• init
• watch
• set
• overview

You can about their options with -h or --help option. (e.g squirrel init -h, etc.)

squirrel init -n Assay --project-type text

Set can be used after init to change or set fields.

squirrel set --name "English Assay" --goal 10000 -due 05/01/2022

Run this command to tell squirrel to watch your writing.

squirrel watch start --daemon
squirrel watch status
squirrel watch stop

Similar to .gitignore files in git repos, you can ignore files in squirrel projects by adding a .squirrelignore file in the root of your project.

Note: .*, *~, *~ and .<dir> are ignored by default

Example file structure:

• .squirrel/
• thesis.tex
• .squirrelignore

# .squirrelignore file

# How to ignore files and file types
*.tmp
README.md

# How to ignore directories
tmp_dir/

If you're looking to help squirrel become better, we're always looking for people to test, report any bugs, improve documentation, and submit any fixes or features. Any contribution (even documentation) goes a long way.

PRs are welcome :). Make sure to open an issue before submitting the PR so that everybody can chip in with their opinion.

If your PR with be changing some dependencies, don't forget to update Pipfile.lock as well as the dependencies in setup.py with pipenv-setup.

The testing suite is very small at the moment (about 7 tests). We need help in making it robust and exhaustive. Any contribution on this regard is highly appreciated.

squirrel is still in an experimental stage. Bugs are probably present, so any testing and bug reporting is welcome.