HTAG(1)

💖 HTAG(1) 💖

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, and let me tell you about htag.pl — the man page is literally called HTAG(1) and it lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation section. she's a perl girlie. she's been around a minute. she's thriving. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

htag.pl — adds taglines and sigs to your email, news and fidonet messages. no cap, that's the whole job description. 💅

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

htag.pl [-t tagfile -c cfgfile] -m msgfile

htag.pl -f sigfile

htag.pl -h

three moods. pick your fighter. 🌈

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so htag.pl is a sigmonster. yes that's the technical term, i don't make the rules. she's built to be extendable in a whole bunch of different ways through her plugin system — very modular of her, very main character energy 👑

tho ngl, the man page itself says she might be getting a little bit too sentient in her old age. so like. keep an eye on her. 🫶

you can use her like this:

htag.pl -m $1

$EDITOR $1

(that's the vibe — htag does her thing, then you open the file in your editor. chef's kiss. 😭)

for the full rundown on configuration, go look at the sample .htrc file. that's where the lore lives.

now, here's the part i'm obsessed with: making signature files by hand is tedious because you have to sit there doing mental math like "will this line up?? will it not??" — which is exactly why the -f option exists, periodt. you feed it a sigfile and it swaps out all the @[0-9]+[RC]?@ bits with the right number of spaces, so you can actually see whether you got it right or not. no more guessing, no more crying. ✨

and if you're a vim girlie (or any editor with shell escapes, iykyk), you can literally run it from inside your editor on the current file, like:

:! htag.pl -f %

iconic. we love a workflow. 🌸

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💀 BUGS 💀

okay so. if you insert a tagline that contains @[0-9]+[RC]?@... you get interesting results. 👀 and by "interesting" the man page means it, so consider this your warning bestie. don't do it. or do, but know what you're getting into. 🙈

also, direct quote, the docs themselves say: "This documentation is useless. Use The Source Luke." — so like. the source is the source. read it. it's giving ancient wisdom. 🌟

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• ~/.htrc — the config file. this is home. this is where you set your whole vibe.

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• http://www.earth.li/progs/htag.html

go click it, go read, go be informed. 💜

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Simon Huggins <huggie@earth.li> — the legend herself. thank you for your service. 🫡

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and that's the whole page bestie!! now go add some taglines, line up those sigs, and remember: the -f flag is your best friend 💖

signing off with the deets: this one's from perl v5.32.1, dated 2022-01-12 — mwah, xoxo, go forth and sig 🦋✨