rpick is a command line tool that helps you to pick items from a sorted list, using a Gaussian
probability model. Things near the top of the list have the highest probability of being chosen,
while things at the end of the list have the lowest chance. Once an item has been picked and the
user has accepted the choice, the list is saved to disk with the picked item moved to the end of
the list.
An example use case for this is picking a restaurant. You might want to generally go to restaurants you haven't visited in a while, but you also might not want to use a strict least recently used model and spice things up with some element of chance, with restaurants you've lease recently visited getting a boost in their chances.
rpick keeps its lists in a YAML file in your home config directory called
rpick.yml. For now, users must create this file by hand, and rpick will manage it from
there. To get started with our restaurant example, create ~/.config/rpick.yml like this:
---
restaurant:
model: gaussian
choices:
- Spirits
- Lucky 32
- Centro
- Sitti
- Cookout
Then you can ask rpick to pick one for you:
$ rpick restaurant
Choice is Lucky 32. Accept? (Y/n)
If you say yes, it will rewrite the yaml file like this:
---
restaurant:
model: gaussian
choices:
- Spirits
- Centro
- Sitti
- Cookout
- Lucky 32
Note that we passed restaurant as an argument to rpick - this told rpick to look
for the restaurant object in rpick.yml to find out which model to use and which choices
were available. This parameter is required, but its possible values are defined by you in your
config file.
The model field in the config file is required, but at the time of writing only gaussian
is a valid model. There are tentative plans to add other models later in the future.
This project is available on crates.io.