##Boxy
I admit it; I’m obsessive! Many years ago I used a compiler that would ‘prettyprint’ code as it compiled it so that the listings, on paper, would look nice -- actually it made it much easier to read as well.
A few years ago I decided I wanted to pretty up my Objective-C in a similar way. Since I wasn’t quite crazy enough to actually modify the clang compiler, I wrote boxy which only ormaments files. The boxy app is an Objective-C shell command which replaces certain directives in any file with pretty boxes.
For example, the following text:
/*box
This method is a ghastly mistake
*/
is transformed into:
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ This method is a ghastly mistake ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
Since Markdown may have trouble with rendering this, that’s a solid box made from unicode symbols which surrounds the text.
If your manager hates such foolishness then unboxy will reverse the process.
Both boxy and unboxy take one parameter - the name of the file to be dolled up, ie:
boxy file_that_was_ugly.m
unboxy file_to_be_made_ugly.m
NB: Since boxy and unboxy write over the file presented, it’s worth making a temporary copy in case you make a mistake. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
There are a few variations of the box style, double (/*box=), heavy (/*box-), normal and dotted (/*box.).
There’s also boxer which changes local ascii-art boxes into really arty boxes, for example:
+---+
|abc|
+---+
becomes:
┏━━━┓
┃abc┃
┗━━━┛
draft: 2015-04-03