Drafts CLI

Command line interface for Drafts. Requires Drafts Pro.

demo.mp4

Install

1. Install the CLI:

brew install ernstwi/tap/drafts

2. Install the required helper application (see "Implementation notes" below):

brew install --cask --no-quarantine ernstwi/tap/drafts-helper

3. Install the required helper action from the Drafts Directory

Usage

$ drafts --help
Usage: drafts <command> [<args>]

Options:
  --help, -h             display this help and exit

Commands:
  new                    create new draft
  prepend                prepend to draft
  append                 append to draft
  replace                append to draft
  edit                   edit draft in $EDITOR
  get                    get content of draft
  select                 select active draft using fzf

See further: drafts <command> --help

Implementation notes

It is easy to send commands to Drafts. This is done using actions defined in Drafts' URL scheme. Using a custom action, we can send arbitrary JavaScript to be executed in Drafts.

The more difficult thing is how to get a response back from Drafts to the CLI. Drafts' URL scheme offers a x-success parameter which can be used to call a separate URL with the result of an action. The problem is that the drafts CLI process can't catch this call directly.

My solution to this problem was to make a separate macOS app (Drafts CLI Helper) whose only purpose is to catch x-success calls from Drafts, and forward them via Unix socket to the appropriate drafts CLI process. The resulting system is illustrated below.

graph LR;
    cli[Drafts CLI]-- URL scheme -->drafts[Drafts]
    drafts-- URL scheme -->cbh[Drafts CLI Helper]
    cbh-- Unix socket -->cli

Loading

Dev setup

ln -s "$PWD/dist/Drafts CLI Helper.app" /Applications/
PATH=$PATH:$PWD/dist/drafts_darwin_all
./build.sh   # To build
./release.sh # To build and publish a new release