Structur.py

Structur is a simple, Python-based command-line tool to help extract and organize coded text from research notes.

I’ve been using it for a year now, from the Finder. It’s useful to find the structure of longer pieces of text.

I was inspired by John McPhee’s writing process, which he describes in Draft No. 4.

Structur exploded my notes. It read the codes by which each note was given a destination or destinations (including the dustbin). It created and named as many new Kedit files as there were codes, and, of course, it preserved intact the original set. In my first I.B.M. computer, Structur took about four minutes to sift and separate fifty thousand words. My first computer cost five thousand dollars. I called it a five-thousand-dollar pair of scissors.

Structur is my take on what McPhee describes.

It is available on GitHub.

Cite as:

Tubb, Daniel. Structur.py. GitHub, 2024. https://github.com/dtubb/structur.