spork87 / ruler

A simple text ruler like on a typewriter

ruler - a guide for terminal widths

A character ruler could be used in the status line of tmux or screen or as part of a command line Twitter client.

An 80 column wrap is a convention, but sometimes you want an abitrary length or the full terminal width.

An offset could be used to match width of shell prompt and script name.

With no argument ruler will determine the terminal environment and fit the width, or set the length to 80 if no terminal environment exits.

In 2012 the best tweets had under 40 characters, so a ruler can remind you to be succinct.

Options

$ ruler -h
usage: ruler [-h] [-i] [-o OFFSET] [-b BEGIN] [-l LENGTH]

Make a ruler of characters; terminal width is default

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i, --info            Return terminal height and width; also available from
                        command `stty size`
  -o OFFSET, --offset OFFSET
                        Use spaces to offset the ruler start
  -b BEGIN, --begin BEGIN
                        Begin counting at this number
  -l LENGTH, --length LENGTH
                        Length of ruler in characters

Usage

$ ruler
- - _ - -1- - _ - -2- - _ - -3- - _ - -4- - _ - -5- - _ - -6- - _ - -7- - _ - |8| - _ - -9- - _ - -a- - _ - -b

$ ruler -i
(75, 110)

$ ruler -o 10
          - - _ - -1- - _ - -2- - _ - -3- - _ - -4- - _ - -5- - _ - -6- - _ - -7- - _ - |8| - _ - -9- - _ - -a

$ ruler -l 81
- - _ - -1- - _ - -2- - _ - -3- - _ - -4- - _ - -5- - _ - -6- - _ - -7- - _ - |8|

$ ruler -o 11 -l 40
           - - _ - -1- - _ - -2- - _ - -

A trailing space is converted to a visible character for glancing readability.

$ ./ruler -l 8
- - _ -.