NTxt

NTxt is a text file query and formatting tool. If you provide NTxt with a well formatted text document it will parse that document into a tree of text blocks which you can then search by text or by tag, and then display the results by block.

Block have parent blocks, so that your document is parsed into a tree of text blocks. Querying and printing the document then becomes an exercise in walking the document tree. This is not unlike an HTML DOM, but much much smaller and targeted at plain text files.

Words surrounded by [square brackets] form tags that are associated with the text block they are found in. Finding a block with a tag and printing it often serves as an easy way to query the text file for the snippet of information you were looking for.

Tags of a block of text are also associated with that block's parent block. The root block, therefore, has all tags in the document tree. This has the happy side-effect that if you print all blocks with tag [foo] you will have a valid NTxt sub-document. Thus you can split up your big text files into smaller ones, forming almost a mini adhoc database collection of information.

These are like HTML headers. There are 6 levels and they are denoted by 1 to 6 equals (=) signs surrounding some text on a line by itself. For instance

 = Header 1 =
 == Header 2 ==
 === Header 3 ===
 ==== Header 4 ====
 ===== Header 5 =====
 ====== Header 6 ======

or

 # Header 1
 ## Header 2
 ### Header 3
 #### Header 4
 ##### Header 5
 ###### Header 6

or

 Header 1
 ========
 Header 2
 --------

Each header begins or ends a block depending on the preceding header level.

Text that is indented is a block. This block will go "below" any preceding header block. That is, plain text always goes inside header blocks. It's what you think.

An empty line will end a paragraph, and thus a block of text.

These are not bugs, but you might be tempted to think they are.

1. There is not auto-formatting. This is intentional. I didn't want to reinvent Markdown.