New is a template system, especially useful in conjunction with a
simple text editor such as vi. The user maintains templates which
may contain format strings. At run time, nf replaces the format
strings in a template with appropriate values to create a new file.
For example, given the following template:
// FILE: %(FILE)
// AUTHOR: %(FULLNAME)
// DATE: %(DATE)
// Copyright (C) 1999 %(FULLNAME) %(EMAIL)
// All rights reserved.
nf will create:
// FILE: foo.cpp
// AUTHOR: W. Michael Petullo
// DATE: 11 September 1999
// Copyright (C) 1999 W. Michael Petullo new@flyn.org
// All rights reserved.
on my computer.
The program understands plaintext or gziped template files.
The fmt-ptrn system also provides a shared library which allows a
programmer access to nf's functionality. The system was developed to
be light and fast. Its only external dependencies are the C library,
glib2 and zlib.