Markdown Curator (mdcurate)

Tool for curating metadata (also called frontmatter) and content in markdown files.

With the Markdown Curator you can easily and safely:

• Rename metadata keys: did you mean author instead of writer? A few clicks and you've got it fixed.
• Conditionally change and tidy metadata fields. Change strings to lists, change capitalization, and much more.
• Easily find and correct files with bad metadata or other errors.

Instead of manually doing a search+replace, or trying to craft your own scripts or regular expressions, simply launch the Markdown Curator and let it help you.

You might be surprised what curiosities you find in your metadata!

How to Use

You can use npx to launch mdcurate directly, without installing:

npx mdcurate

Or install as a permanent CLI tool using npm:

npm install -g mdcurate
# then launch
mdcurate

Running mdcurate launches a local server. You do the curation from your browser, but for privacy and security everything only happens locally: no external services are ever contacted, for any reason.

Note: you can also pass in the --dir (or -d) flag to launch it from a specific, single directory. If you don't specify a directory, it will use the current working directory. E.g. you can do mdcurate --dir or npx mdcurate --dir and it'll have your current directory loaded, or mdcurate --dir /path/to/folder --ext md,txt to set a specific folder and set of extensions.

Example

Imagine you have a growing collection of markdown files with frontmatter/metadata, and some look like this:

---
title: My Blog Post
tags: fruit, behaviour, pants
---

The behaviour of pants-wearing is correlated with fruit consumption.

The curator screen for inspecting the tags metadata looks something like this:

If you found that in some files you used tag instead of tags, you can simply rename the property. If you have a metadata property that you don't use anymore, you can simply delete it:

Or if you wanted to change the tag behaviour to behavior across all files, you could use the bulk editor:

Configuration

By default, this launches a server using port 3000. You can set that with the --port or -p flag:

# if installed globally
mdcurate -p 8080
# or with npx
npx mdcurate -p 8080

License

Published and released under the Very Open License.

If you need a commercial license, contact me here.