##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