Lax

An argument substitution utility intended to make working on projects with deeply nested directories a bit easier.

"Lax" stands for "Locate Args and Execute."

Basic Usage

Given a binary and an "@" pattern "@foo", Lax will will find the file "foo" and replace "@foo" with "foo"'s full path, then execute the binary with the new arguments

lax echo @foo -> echo ./foobar/foo

Multiple "@" patterns's are possible:

lax stat @foo @bar @baz -> stat ./foobar/foo ./foobar/target/bar ./foobar/src/baz

Mixing and matching "@" patterns and normal arguments is also possible:

lax cat -n @foo bar @baz -> cat -n ./foobar/foo bar ./foobar/src/baz

Globbing

Globbing is fully supported via globset.

lax echo @*.rs -> echo ./some/directory/main.rs

** is also supported, but is treated specially. The portion of the pattern before the first /**/(note the surrounding slashes) is the search entry point. That is, given a pattern like @foo/**/bar, Lax will look in the directory ./foo for a file that matches bar. Any following ** are handled normally:

lax echo @foo/**/bar/**/baz

Will look in directory ./foo for a path that matches bar/**/baz. That is, any entity baz that is a descendent of directory bar.

Making use of the search entry point can speed up searches if you know which top-level subdirectory your query is in, but you don't want to cd into it for whatever reason. It can also be used to specify a path outside your directory.

Selectors

If there are multiple files matching the given name, Lax will prompt you to choose.
However, you can also specify which file you'd want ahead of time:

lax echo @*.rs^1 # Select the first match  
lax echo @*.rs^2 # Select the second match  
lax echo @*.rs^a # Expand to all matches

Now you know the full syntax for "@" patterns:

@[SEARCH_ENTRY_POINT/**/]GLOB_PATTERN[^SELECTOR]

Where SEARCH_ENTRY_POINT is a directory, GLOB_PATTERN is a glob pattern, and SELECTOR is [1..n|'a']

Primary Use Case

In your .bashrc, you can write alias vim="lax vim"

From now on, you can just write:

vim @foo -> vim ./foobar/foo

This makes working on projects with deep directories, like U-Boot and Yocto, easier. If the compiler complains about an error in my_stupid_little_c_file.c, you can:

vim @*stupid*file.c

Using With cd

You might try to use Lax to do things like:

lax cd @some_deep_nested_subdirectory

But you will quickly discover this does not work as intended, as cd is affecting the current directory of its environment, which belongs to a child process of the shell.

Instead, you can add this to your .bashrc:

cd(){
	local args;
	if ! args=$(lax -pd -- ${@}); then
		return 1
	fi
	command cd ${args}
}

The -p flag tells Lax to not execute anything, but simply transform arguments and print them to stdout. The -d flag tells it to only match with directories, as cd has no interest in files. You could also use the -D flag if you want to match files, but cd to their parent directory, instead.

Installing

git clone [email protected]:Property404/lax
cargo install --path lax

License

MIT or Apache-2.0