Genie

genie - a tool for tagging arbitrary file paths with arbitrary tags

Installation

Download the latest release, and put the binary somewhere in your shell’s PATH. Using an install location of /usr/local/bin is a popular choice.

CLI Usage

Use genie --help to see usage instructions

Invocation

genie [SUBCOMMAND]

Flags

short flag	long flag	description
`-h`	`--help`	Prints help information
`-v`	`--version`	Prints version information
`-j`	`--json`	Gives output as json string for use in Alfred (only used by the `search` subcommand)
`-l`	`--list`	Prints out a listing of all tags used in genie (only used by the `tag` subcommand)

Subcommands

command	short version	description
`help`	n/a	Prints this help message
`rm [PATH] [TAG]`	n/a	remove from the given `PATH` the given `TAG`
`search [TAGLIST] [FLAG]`	`s`	search for and return all paths that have all of the tags given in `TAGLIST`
`print [PATH]`	`p`	show all tags applied to the given `PATH`
`tag [PATH] [TAG] [FLAG]`	`t`	tag the given `PATH` with the given `TAG`, or print a list of all tags used.

Alfred Usage

Once you’ve started tagging your filepaths with meaningful tags, you may find yourself wanting to quickly find and action a particular filepath. One way to do this is using the search command in a terminal. A more graphical way is to use Alfred.

Installing the Alfred Workflow

In order to use genie’s search command from within Alfred, you must first install the Genie Workflow for Alfred.

Install Alfred
Download the Genie Workflow
Double-click on the downloaded file in Finder
Follow the on-screen instructions to install the workflow into Alfred

Using the Alfred Workflow

While you can use the Alfred workflow with the tag, rm, and print genie commands, it is most useful when used with the search command. To use the workflow to search for all filepaths with a given tag

Invoke your configured Alfred hotkey(s)
type g search TAG (or g s TAG) replacing TAG with the tag that you would like to search for
Select the filepath that you’re interested in, and action it as desired.

Some common actions include quicklooking the file with either the shift key or cmd + y. Once you’re quicklooking a filepath, Quick Look often has additional actions that you can take such as opening a file in a particular application.

Advanced Usage

On macOS, genie uses ~/Documents/.geniedb as the location of its backing sqlite store. If there is not a file to be found at that location whenever genie is invoked, it will create the file and the requisite sqlite table(s).

If you are feeling adventurous, after you’ve invoked genie at least once to create the file and needed tables, you can move that sqlite document to any location and symlink it back to the original path of ~/Documents/.geniedb. As an illustrative example, after you’ve invoked genie at least once, you can do something like

mv ~/Documents/.geniedb ~/Dropbox/geniedb
ln -s ~/Dropbox/geniedb ~/Documents/.geniedb

Once you’ve done this, genie will traverse the symlink and the backing store for genie can be synced and shared across multiple machines. This means that when using the search command, the returned paths may not live locally on the machine that you’re invoking genie from. You will need to pay attention to the indicated host and then locate the file on the corresponding machine in order to interact with it.

Running a development version

Clone the project
Build with swift build (or swift build -c release to build a version with debugging symbols stripped out)
Install by copying the binary from the architecture specific folder in .build/ to a location in your PATH environment variable. This usually looks something like

cp .build/x86_64-apple-macosx/release/genie /usr/local/bin

Alternatively you can run the built version from within the .build folder

License

genie is copyright 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 zach wick zach@zachwick.com and is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 or later. You can find a copy of the GNU GPLv3 included in the project as the file named License.