own-repos-curator

A TUI for editing and managing introductory descriptions for each repository, centered around a list of your repositories. Written in Rust.

Status

• Currently dogfooding.

Purpose

• For efficiently creating repository descriptions.
  • (Applies to your public repositories only; forks and archived repositories are excluded)

Features

• Visualization through grouping and tagging.
• And more (details might be covered in the explanation below).

Installation

Rust is required.

cargo install --force --git https://github.com/cat2151/own-repos-curator

Execution

own-repos-curator

update

own-repos-curator update

Check for Updates

own-repos-curator check

Breaking Changes

• Occur frequently.

Explanation generated by Codex CLI:

What is this?

own-repos-curator is a TUI application designed to help you cultivate introductory descriptions for each of your public GitHub repositories, starting from your repository list. It allows you to organize a 1-line description, 3-line description, tag, and group locally, and save them as repos.json, all while leveraging factual information retrieved from GitHub.

It’s designed not just as a tool to browse a list, but as a workspace to prepare your public repositories in a way that makes them presentable to others later.

When would you appreciate this?

• When your public repositories have grown, and it’s hard to get an overview of what you’ve created.
• When GitHub’s description isn’t enough to convey the purpose or highlights, and you want to organize them separately.
• When you want to gather material first, as a preliminary step before creating descriptions for READMEs, portfolios, GitHub Pages, or introduction pages.
• When you’ve been manually transcribing to spreadsheets or notes, but missing repository additions or updates has become cumbersome.
• When you want to refine descriptions for multiple repositories quickly, using only the keyboard, without switching back and forth between browser tabs.
• When you want to organize ‘which repo to show in which category’ using tags and groups.

It’s particularly suited for those who continuously maintain and grow their public repositories. It helps reduce situations where you’ve created something, but its description lags behind, causing it to be overlooked.

What makes it unique compared to existing solutions?

1. Fills gaps where GitHub’s repository list or description falls short.

While GitHub provides mechanisms for fetching repository lists and editing descriptions, it’s not optimized for the experience of cross-repository description development. own-repos-curator synchronizes repository names, update times, and existing descriptions from GitHub, and allows you to manage your ‘personal introduction data’ on top of that.

In other words, its uniqueness lies not in replacing GitHub, but in using GitHub as a source of factual data while maintaining the descriptive context in a separate layer.

2. More specialized for repository management than spreadsheets or Notion.

While you can manage repository introductions in spreadsheets or Notion, repository additions and updates need to be manually imported. This application allows you to perform repository list synchronization, description editing, tagging, group assignment, and filtering all within the same interface.

Its strength lies in its focus on the single goal of ‘keeping public repositories in a presentable state,’ rather than the general-purpose flexibility of other tools.

3. Not just for text editing, but leaves reusable JSON as an asset.

Introduction data is saved to repos.json. This makes it easy to repurpose the data for GitHub Pages, static sites, other tools, or generation scripts in the future, without being confined to the application.

Furthermore, this repository allows you to copy the JSON to related local repositories, automatically push to a backup repository on startup (if configured), or manually commit/push from the TUI with Shift+P. This means it’s not just about creating descriptions, but cultivating them as public assets.

4. A TUI designed for a large volume of small edits.

This application is better suited for quickly adding short descriptions and classifications to many repositories, rather than deeply editing a single repository. Tag assignment, group assignment, filtering, and sorting are all keyboard-driven, making it well-suited for an workflow where you ‘gradually fill in descriptions’.

Past Challenges and How This Application Solves Them

Challenge 1. Repository list management quickly becomes manual.

It’s cumbersome to transcribe new repositories to introduction notes or lists every time you create one. As a result, there’s a disconnect between the repositories you want to introduce and those you’ve actually organized.

This application synchronizes the repository list from GitHub, so you no longer need to manually maintain the list. The first solution is that the ‘starting point for inventory’ is automatically aligned.

Challenge 2. GitHub descriptions alone provide insufficient introductory information.

GitHub descriptions are short and make it difficult to include details like purpose, background, key highlights, or related categories. On the other hand, writing everything in a README makes it hard to compare items in a list or review them across repositories.

This application allows you to keep the GitHub description while also maintaining separate 1-line descriptions and 3-line descriptions. By separating ‘minimal GitHub descriptions’ from ‘supplementary introduction descriptions’, it becomes easier to organize how you present your repositories.

Challenge 3. The more repositories you have, the harder it is to find them without a classification axis.

As the number grows, without an organizing axis like ‘Is it a CLI?’, ‘Is it a web app?’, ‘Is it for learning?’, or ‘Is it for public use?’, they become difficult to utilize.

This application allows you to use tags and groups to organize repositories into meaningful categories. Furthermore, by supporting filtering and page switching, it transforms a mere list into a searchable one.

Challenge 4. Scattered introductory data is difficult to reuse.

When introduction texts are scattered across READMEs, notes, spreadsheets, and local JSON files, it becomes unclear which version is the latest. Also, repurposing them for different public channels incurs formatting costs every time.

This application centralizes introduction information in repos.json, consolidating the starting point for reuse. This makes it easier to connect to future site generation or data publishing, and also simplifies backup operations.

Challenge 5. The preparation of introductory descriptions tends to be postponed.

The task of opening each repository in a browser and writing descriptions is heavy, and introduction texts tend to be put off.

This application is a TUI, well-suited for ‘refining short descriptions one after another while viewing a list,’ thus reducing the cost of preparing introductions. As a result, it becomes easier to catch up on descriptions after creating a repository.

Summary

own-repos-curator is an application designed to transform your public repositories on GitHub from a mere ‘list of what exists’ into a ‘list of what can be introduced to others’.

Its uniqueness lies in consolidating GitHub synchronization and description editing, along with tagging, grouping, and JSON asset creation, into a single workflow. The role of this application is to organize the previously manual and scattered process of repository introduction into a sustainable workflow.